So Far Poem by Phillip Ellis

Reaching forty in a month or two,
it may be occasion to look back,
not at the bitter length of fallowness
but more the efflorescence as of
a moonflower flowering
in an unbidden full moon.
Such is the nature of my glance
as I contemplate the past, he says.

Yet is it possible to not see
the long years of decline and recovery
in the suddenness of the flowering,
especially when you walk
along the ways of what is being done,
and not what has been dreamt and done?