I

William, I too have sailed the surging water,
but my Byzantium was a white ward at dawn,
a Friday with no promise, and an X-ray
glowing like morning sun through stained glass
where my broken hip confessed its fragility
without even a priest to hear it.

The young still lie in one another’s arms,
but scrolling now, their springtime lit by screens,
forgetting what is begotten, born, and dies.

And still the dying generations sing of better times.
I hear them through the window: practicing
the scales of a world now long gone.

Yes, a tattered coat. Yes. Mine is wool, and sags
at the elbows where I have leaned too long on tables
conversing with the dead. You among them.

II

Your goldsmiths have finished the eternal bird, William.
It sits now in every hidden pocket, unageing,
beaten from light and promises,
singing to no drowsy emperor but to all of us
awake at three a.m. and wondering about this life.
It knows what is past, and passing,
and can guess at what’s to come,
yet it has never once been sick with desire,
not like all of us before the light of day.

So I decline your ruse, old friend,
not out of courage but out of love remembered and gone,
for this eternal bird reminds me too much of hunger,
of tasting the salt on a lover’s arm after swimming,
of aching for more that cannot come.

Let the soul clap its hands, yes,
but let them be these hands, unsteady, spotted, slow,
holding a small hand across the abyss.

There is no country for old men, I agree.
There is only this country, and we are its weather,
passing and passing, and singing as we pass.

For William Butler Yeats

4/11/2026