It’s all we have, he said, he said.
He said it’s all we have
Something,
anything, to leave behind:
a mark, a song, a word, a deed,
a stone overturned,
a monument.
But alas, he said, alas and alas,
that, too,
it shall not be.
Concentric forms upon a plain
or geometrical tombs at Giza,
all of it, he said, he said,
are nothing, are nothing to me.
Put there by
a man,
they will not last,
mankind
will see to that.
About John Bell SmithbackJohn Bell Smithback is a former teacher and newspaper columnist living in Bellingham, Washington. He has published more than 50 books defining English idioms and proverbs for an international audience, as well as The Lonely Dark, a novel about America in the age of the atomic bomb, and Silent in the Dawn, a collection of poems. In his early years he lived in the Monterey, California house where John Steinbeck once wrote and where he met friends from Steinbeck’s time.
Most read American writer of the 20th century. Born in California. Died in New York. Romantic. Realist. Rebel. More about John Steinbeck
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