Love dies (New poem)

Love dies

The cruelties and indignities of age

catch up with us whether we are looking for them

or not/ each day taken like another little needle

in the finitude of arms we reach out with

and gasping grasp for

once I was a teenager/ now even in my twenties

it feels like more than a lifetime ago

when I would teach and in teaching taught that

there is only one place we have to go

and everything else but a preparation

for this

it was over sixteen years since I bought the album

I sing along to now/ betraying my age

and how I sing to heaven

knowing there is no heaven but the sleep

of incoming death

and love is the first thing to go

and in its fading like the light of an Autumn night

lets go/ and in its twinkling dies