Things Don’t Matter

 

Sitting by the beside the old man

Is older no more.

Looking for his mother and father,

His first love and wife,

He asks desperately where are they?

They were there a moment ago,

Real and touchable,

As we brought the hay from the fields,

And took the warm milk from my mother,

In a rural Ireland, long since deserted.

But today, by his bedside,

I notice something else.

What he isn’t talking about,

The things he has completely forgotten,

His home, possessions,

The precious car.

Because they don’t matter.

At all.