More Of What Remains Poem by Frank Bana

Viewed as a glass half empty, not as a well half full
It is a small disturbance to the mind
To manage all these desert hours, with consideration
Of inheritance and legacy. And I’ll perhaps be glad
When later there’s no time - for none of this

Thus stalled, I’m forced to gather poems together,
The fragments into handfuls, adding shards and hues
Most tenuous and temporary, like the pebbles
That are gifted in a velvet pouch at a mystic wedding
And spill out in shocked disorder, lost years later

Insisting by this duty that something remains, despite all that is known
Of flesh is grass and solid melts to air –
That someone passing comes to rest, to take the edge from thirst
While charting a direction in the dry savannah plain,
At these thorn-bush lined, pole-buttressed wells.