Sitting down
An old man is like a rock, rough hewn,
Which a god shaped
Shaped here and scooped there
With sharp eagerness.

Standing
And supporting himself with crook,
The weakness creeps out at knee,
And the old man now is like a dragon-fly
At the painful moment of birth.

We are born and grow.
Quietly, imperceptibly, the process unfolds,
Of a baby growing to a boy, a boy to a man.
And then suddenly we realize
That what we no longer are.

Then the drama starts
Of shifting ourselves into this guise and that.
Touching, tasting, testing
Staining the purity of youth.

But relief comes with experience.
Experience, the pegs of pain
Piercing to the formless mass
Of the turnoil inside man.
Now the soul is born, but gone too is the fire
Which would have inspired it.

So man falls back
To the patterned repetition of traditions
And so sitting down he looks rock-strong,
But standing in the broken pitcher.