There will come a time, not far away,
I'll bid this earth adieu
As we all must when our time comes
To tell us our turn's through.

I'll have a lavish funeral
My family will be sad.
They'll stand around and talk about
The happy times we had.

And, at the club, my golfing pals
Will tell jokes and recall
The silly way I swung a club
Or how I hit the ball.

My kids will often think of me
Some funny anecdote
About some foolish thing I did
Or simple poem I wrote.

Fifty years pass. All friends are gone
Most everyone I'd known.
My kids will be grandparents now
With grandkids of their own.

Yet, still, though quite infrequently,
An opportunity
May come around to give someone
A cause to think of me.

Another hundred years go by.
Now no one has survived
Who walked this earth when
I did At the time I was alive.

All stories are forgotten.
EveryThing about myself.
My life has been reduced to but
A picture on a shelf.

Another hundred years. By now
All photos are gone, too
And every house that I lived in
Plus every place I knew.

I will not have existed
And I know this well because
I had a great-great-grandpa once
But don't know who he was.

I don't know what he liked to do,
What kind of job he had.
No way to know what made him tick,
What made him smile or sad.

So that's the way it is, my friends.
It happens to us all
Who don't do something glorious
That history may recall.

And so I sit, with pen in hand,
Creating verse because
It's not to show you what I am
But show the world I was.