What Is It To Be Alive? Poem by Shalom Freedman

What is it to be alive?
To stand in the early morning Jerusalem cold
And remember the same kind of cold
My father of blessed memory also sensed on the road down from the junk shop
In Lansingburgh New York so many many years ago?

What is to be alive
And sense the morning brightness and freshness
And to know in five or ten or who knows how many years
Someone else will sense this elsewhere?

What is to not be alive?
And perhaps never know this special kind of morning freshness and brightness again?