The Reckoning Poem by Barry Middleton

The days of youth are long in leisure.
It then was easy to neglect
the duties that in retrospect
become the measure of a man.
I'd leave my job half done at noon
to check the meadows, creeks and hills
and often I would stay too late,
nor think of food upon my plate
while I was figuring the will
that caused an indigent daffodil
to bloom among the ferns and vines
so far in time from human kind.
Whose ancestor had passed this way
and planted flowers as if to stay
and was that all he left behind?
Oh, I knew of a fire that scorched the brick
and melted glass that lay beneath
the old frame house where supper waited.
I knew we had built on his foundation
to try and work out our salvation
without much thought to when or where
he laid his flowers out with care.
But a man's youth is only a page
and a man's dream in a different age
is harder to reckon that why a boy
stays late in the wood to merely enjoy
the yellow blooms he picked for his mother
or a few yellow questions saved for another.