The March wind doth blow...

This blog was going to be called: Getting Closer and Closer to my Sell-by Date, but it has snowed quite heavily and Captain B has taken some pictures.

My poem takes us back a season - and back in time, to when I was coming up to 40 and beginning to realise how quickly our life goes.  I hope I haven't blogged it before:

THE BOTANICAL GARDENS IN AUTUMN

 by me

As the year sets slowly in the West

Its last dying glow

Sets fire to the gardens.

Chrysanthemums blaze

Virginia creeper reddens on stone walls

Walking here, nearly forty, I know

How short it all is, how quickly it goes

Shivering, I warm myself at the dahlia’s flame

The firethorne’s hot coals.

And I am a lot older than that now...  and grateful to be here, though it is all getting painful and difficult.

Philip Larkin, who had a horror of his coming death all his life, wrote:

"Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break"
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/philip_larkin/poems/14537

The "huge and birdless silence" is getting closer.  And we are right to be horrified by it. We were not made to die.

But the Inspired Scriptures assure us that Jehovah can and will remember us, keep us safe in "the everlasting arms", and wake us up when the time comes.

So I hope Philip Larkin has a wonderful awakening ahead of him into the restored earthly Paradise. Given that he saw so clearly the horror of death, he will be so happy to know that he has before him the prospect of life "to time indefinite".   All we have to do is love our Creator, listen to Him and obey Him.  And, in  the new earth, nothing will be easier, or make us happier.