Inseparable

Each day of life is a new beginning
Each loss but a step to a final winning
Each happiness a result of an earlier grief,
For life is like a wind-blown leaf
With no direction, no master plot
That the wind of chance has cannily caught.

Life is the total of the good and the bad,
The gay and the merry, the sombre and the sad.
And, knowing its agony is to know its balm,
For the wind of chance is sometimes calm
And the leaf of life that today might fly
Tomorrow might flutter and settle and die.

Yet none is free to die, having been born,
For certain bonds unite - as the sheaf and the corn.
The farmer, whose fields yield forth his grain,
Is he dead, when dead, never to produce again?
Or lives he on, in crops to be reapt
From seed he stored before he slept?

And none is free to live, having died.
For death like the ocean flow cannot be denied.
And the living still must live, to link the chain
Of continuity, that make the dead alive again.
For the leaf of life that today might fly
Tomorrow might flutter, and settle and die.

Life is death and death is life, moreover
Inseparable the two, as the bee and the clover.
And whether the leaf of life flies on
Or whether flutters, settles and is gone
What follow death is life renewed
A link... a connection... an interlude.