Elegy

Your time was short and yet you marked
Indelibly the lives you touched;
Providing when y0u saw we lacked,
Demanding little, giving much.
Conviction meant you never shirked
Away from death; but fearlessness
Blinded you to the bitter fact
That life is better kept than lost,
And death is an inglorious waste
Beyond which there is nothingness.

II
A full life is a precious gift
To be protected at all cost,
And yet its very pricelessness
Is tenuous - its value lost
And quickly cheapened when bereft
Of purpose and of quality.
Death came then as a sweet release
From the mundane and commonplace
And led me out of dreariness
Into a full eternity.

Una M. McCormack