Oh! To still the hands of time!

YESTERDAY
-n.

The infancy of youth, the youth of manhood, the entire past of age.

But yesterday I should have thought me blest
To stand high-pinnacled upon the peak
Of middle life and look adown the bleak
And unfamiliar foreslope to the West.

Where solemn shadows all the land invest
And stilly voices, half-remembered, speak
Unfinished prophecy, and witch-fires freak
The haunted twilight of the Dark of Rest.

Yea, yesterday my soul was all aflame
To stay the shadow on the dial's face
At manhood's noonmark! Now, in God His name
I chide aloud the little interspace

Disparting me from Certitude, and fain
Would know the dream and vision ne'er again.

• Baruch Arnegriff aka Ambrose Bierce
  Bierce aficionados know that Bierce published his first three books using the pseudonym "Dod Grile" and as "William Herman" for The Dance of Death (1877). But often overlooked are the scores of assumed names Bierce applied in writing the satirical definitions he began in May 1881 in his column "Prattle" in the San Francisco Wasp. The definitions (from A-L) were gathered in The Cynic's Word Book (Doubleday, Page, 1906), and later expanded as The Devil's Dictionary in Volume VII of his Collected Works in 1909. Bierce cleverly used the pseudonyms to cite various "authorities" for the little poems and asides that he himself actually wrote.
  pseudonyms of Ambrose Bierce

§
When I hark back to the
Joys and follies of my youth,
I despair of the time wasted,
The health of my body ruint.

'Twould not be me sitting here A'writing,
(As well all know forsooth!)
Had not those days I tasted, those
Experiences accrued.

Our stones go rolling along,
Gathering the moss of age,
yet we, in our haste, notice it
Not until too late and enraged.

Wherefore went those blithe days of unknowing?
How came me to be in such a state?

"AGE"

^{a sonnet
by}
Jerry E Smith
©06/23/2022
Image source Pixabay