The Future's All That Matter Poem by Francis Duggan

I not unlike many others tend to remember the past
And say back then how times were better and the good days do not last
Always thinking of long dead years and dreading to look ahead
And what I'm writing of this instant by so many has been said.

Boyhood years I still remember long ago and far away
In the meadows of my childhood the sweet scent of new mown hay
And the warm lamp of Summer glowing in the mid day sky
And the swallows I still see them and hear them twittering as they fly.

In the shallows of river pool brown trout basking in the sun
And the little dipper singing on rock where the rapids run
These are things I still remember such fond memories with me stay
Yet we cannot live forever back there in our childhood day.

No we cannot live forever in the times forever gone
For the future's all that matter and the clock keeps ticking on
And we can keep the old memories till they go into decay
Though the boy of forty years back is now looking old and gray.

There are many others like me who say the old days are best
But the fledgeling bird of Summer when he leaves his mother's nest
Flies off to another woodland to stake his own territory
And he doesn't yearn for what he once knew but then he is truly free.

The fields that I knew in childhood are still in my memory
And the past I tend to cling to or does the past cling to me?
But what's gone is gone forever and the past years are long dead
And the future's all that matter for the future is ahead.