Philippe de Champaigne – Still Life with a Skull, c. 1671.
When the final sand falls through the glass, And the land beyond yonder lies waiting, They’ll count up your money, your exhibitions of class, And the times you’ve left someone hating.
They’ll measure your life inside of their heads, With an ounce of forgiveness or two, Then leave you with the many dead And compare some of them against you.
And there you will lay Until no one recalls How you met every day And recovered from falls.
So it stands to good reason That because time always forgets We must value our own season Before we descend to the pits.
“Quick Folk,” imagines the world as quite small when measured against the size of the universe or when held in the hand of a divine being. And it says that, although we sometimes contemplate what happens after death, when we hear the ticking of that mortal clock, still we must laugh and love and live our lives well.
The rhyme scheme is aabb.
Adriaen van Utrecht – Still Life with Bouquet and Skull, c. 1642.
We may all be but beings in spheres of glass
Made to march and tumble as hours pass
While some great Being holds us in mighty hand
Or sets us, like a trinket, upon a cabinet stand
Where we exist like strolling shapes in a snow globe,
Or mobile figurines on a topographic lobe
Where the mountains are like grains of rice
And Antarctica is but a trace of ice—
If we are all but tiny beings in these spheres,
Still have we our hopes and loves and dreams and fears
And as we pass through our short years,
We laugh with joy or cry with tears,
For as the hours wind from the mortal clock
With every quick tick and every quick tock
We wonder what lies past the last frontier
And hold our passing lives more dear.
