Double Rainbow Poem by Sonny Rainshine

He made a vow that he would gaze
upon a double rainbow before his last days;
that he would listen to the opuses of Paganini
and Satie, and discover the fount of paradise,
if not of youth. That he would grieve on the grave of Pasolini
and rebuke the lassitude and the lies.

He promised to himself and loved ones,
his friends, his wife, and his sons,
that he would climb Mt. Kilimanjaro
and voyage in a raft around the Earth
to right all wrongs most quixotically,
to celebrate life with exuberance and mirth,
to treat all people with pity and polity.

He thrust himself toward life,
and therefore toward death and strife,
but assignations with Paganini and Pasolini
receded in face of the work-a-day world—
Mt. Kilimanjaro had just as well be the moon
and his ambition just a genie
in an antique bottle or an indecipherable rune.

Now old, a grandfather, gray and arthritic,
pensive, nostalgic and an armchair critic,
he wonders if what he has accomplished
is enough; if ordinary rainbows
and pop music on the radio Saturday nights
and all the rivers he’d fished
had transported him to heights

far higher than Mt. Kilimanjaro.