Life is Good

Life is good, and then it's bad,

  and then it's good again.

But if this life were all we had,

  I ask, would it have been

worth all the effort, all the trouble,

  only to have it turn to rubble?

But if this life is not the end,

  but just the shadow of

the tragicomical Event

  upon the stage above,

I ask, would it not be worthwhile

  if that event were Love?

One of my Japan poems, composed shortly before the Great Kobe Earthquake in January of 1995.