Caryl Johnston
At the End of an Age
— for John Lukacs
When you set foot in your adopted country
You did not know in fifty years
You’d see what was best in it overthrown —
To watch, from the high windows of your study
November on the lawn, leaves falling,
And long, slow decline.
You would not have wanted to be an old man now,
Though better old than young, and better still
An old man with memories of a full life,
Of the way life was lived among people
Who deepen as they age. Not these effervescents,
Coca-cola youth that almost always stays put,
Wheeling from ageless then to unaging now,
Believing it will manage to cheat the eternal
By ignoring what is mortal.
No, it is not the end of the age,
For no age can die that cannot first create;
And none create who’ve forgotten how to die.
You told them. They did not want to hear;
They could not postpone the prolonging —
At most, they lent an ear, politely,
Calling it gloom or an old man’s memento mori —
They failed to catch, in your tone, the new urgency.
To them above all it was something to avoid —
The strange notion of an ending.
So passed fifty years,
From Churchill, when the sun shone
In its fullness in the West perhaps for the last time.
It was the last of the Western sun’s spiritual glory,
Before those rays shuddered into atomic bombs.
Still, it was not the end,
Though people might have wondered at the history
Of intelligence, and where that history was to lead,
And if to trust that intelligence with ends,
For here was the sign of an ending no one wanted.
So some thought, after the deed,
Until, as with the human way, the future pressed on
So quickly it shattered even the habit of reflection —
There was even something Old World about that,
And after two world wars few could remember how.
The new men built a black memorial to what
History would not let them forget,
And then moved on, ever repeating their youth
As the shadow of that thing grew longer still.
We came, the new ones, shrinking into life — yet
When we pass into living memory, as we will,
Others — if they are living still —
Will wonder at what we let happen to us,
As we stumbled over your reminder
That there is history in what we remember.
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