Pausing for Poetry

                    So?

So you aren't Tolstoy or St. Francis

or even a well known singer

of popular songs and will never read Greek 

or speak French fluently,

will never see something no one else 

has seen before through a lens

or with the naked eye.

You've been given just the one life

in this world that matters

and upon which every other life

somehow depends as long as you live,

and also given the costly gifts of hunger,

choice, and pain with which to raise

a modest shrine to meaning.            ~Leonard Nathan~