The Glory Days

I woke up at 4:45 this morning because I couldn’t sleep. Is there ever any other reason for getting up other than: I am no longer sleeping? But I’m one of those who just gets up once they wake up, 4:45 or no. So, understandably, I was too tired to work on whatever I’d been trying to do. I had been reading To Hell on a Fast Horse, by Mark Lee Gardner, an excellent dual biography of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, and all of that was just spinning around in my head. I was thinking about how time fades glory, and because Billy died dramatically at the height of his notoriety, he became an American hero. Garrett, on the other hand, instantly became The-Man-Who-Shot-Billy-The-Kid, and then had to live the rest of his life trying to keep that climax. But climaxes never last for long.

You never stay on the mountaintops of life for long. After all, why would you? There’s too much wind up there. But anyway, Garrett drifts into debt and dishonor, becoming less famous than Billy. If he’d died like the Kid had, in one fell swoop, he might be as much of a household name as Billy still is. So all that was running around in my poor, sleep-deprived brain, and what did Brain do with it? It wrote a poem.

“The Glory Days”

by Rhoda Marshall

Do you ever think of glory days?

Or ponder bygone times?

How all fades to the dust of Memory,

Falls to the march of Time?

For Time goes ever ever on,

Like someone wrote in song.

But he has faded out as well,

His ‘good old days’ are gone.

They say you don’t know what you have till it’s gone.

Time goes on and on and on.

Things forgotten were great deeds done

And we don’t remember one.

Alexander the Great and Billy the Kid

Will we remember what they did?

When Time has pressed them hard–and won

Forcing them to dust. They are gone.

The Battles of Hastings and of the Bulge

And what about them?

Will we remember what they were for?

And what the dead men accomplished?

For the world is built on the backs of dead men

Whose glory days are gone.

For Time keeps marching onward,

And we don’t remember one.

Time asks: Do you ever think of glory days?

Or ponder bygone times?

Of the great things that are won and lost

In that evil march of Mine?

But fear not, friend, nor be discouraged

That all things pass away.

But revel in the life allowed you:

That each can be a glory day.