The Eternal Pursuit
Death is the light and we its shadows,
Rising like mist over midnight meadows;
Brief are our days, and brash and brutal,
Our lives unplanned and rarely fruitful.
Death is the only immortality,
To meet it well our morality;
The sum of our lives is a small calculation
Of culture, creed, religion or nation.
So let us not fret over such small things
As avarice might bring us, or the whimsies of kings;
Let us instead, with impossible breaths,
Spend all our lives in pursuit of our deaths.