Len Webster's ' The Life Unlived ' Poem by Len Webster

On a small headstone, a name,
a date, a short story
sad in the telling, tragic
in the reading between the lines.
A date, a calculation easily made,
an act of arithmetic beyond his comprehension.
Words etched by acid tears,
hopes and expectations cruelly cut,
shortened into an epitaph
as long almost
as one that could have told
a story of a life
a hundred times his age,
a life the body could not hold
and so let slip into eternity
barely conscious of its own struggle
and sleepless tears
flowing from the pain
of others.