Rain falls and stars rise

Just as each rain drop is not lost,

but becomes part of the pool

without which ripples are not possible,

and just as the summer sun, crystallised

in the brittle bronze leaves of autumn

succumbs at last to gravity,

falls,  

and is swept into the fire

that releases its captive light,

and its substance disperses in the form of billowing smoke,

briefly illuminated by the conflagration,

before receding into the darkness of the lengthening night

where the cold is bright with the astronomies of winter,

and as every failure at the tables merges with the calculus of odds,

all futilities fusing together in the grand aggregation of outcomes,

and every ruin foundation to some success,

so as we progress from the clarity of strident youth,

through maturity and years of service to love in all its forms,

to the confusion and yearning of perplexed old age,

and eventually yield to the final absence and entropy

that waits to claim us,

we are not lost

but become one at last with an infinite night, 

studded with ten hundred thousand stars

becoming at once nothing

and more than we can ever imagine.