* * * *
A Cloudless Night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:
After a tiring day at the Office
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.
Now
unready to die
But - already at the stage
When one starts to resent the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.
It's cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People's Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.
For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn't have happened did.
But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking -
what judgment waits ?
My person
all my friends,
And these United States
WH Auden
