Life After Sixty Poem by AtreyaSarma Uppaluri

[A repartee sent to one of my best poet-friends who had (while on a beautiful poem, Bhaja Govindam, by Adi Sankara, one of the greatest religious philosophers and teachers of all time) suggested in his banter that I better not worry about grammar and all those worldly frivolities but focus on the Divine. ]

Past sixty, life would be much more pretty:
Emptying cups of sizzling lemon tea.
Sing of your past springs in a sweet ditty
And dream of your future springs
Wearing a sixteen’s shoestrings.

Don’t ever pine o’er your age
For it puts you in a cage.

Just mount and ride the high horses of your wishes
And indulge to your heart’s content all the dishes -
Be it grammar or glamour
Cool amour or loud clamor.

No sin to laze in leisure
Nor to seek any pleasure -
Pure mundane
Or highly arcane
Grossly physical
Or metaphysical.

Life is just too brief
Have no tone of grief.

None can halt or end your destined odyssey
Not even fulsome prayers to god, you see.

[Sep 10,2009: : Greenfield, Wisconsin]