Poem for sale

We as people have the predilections

For leading life of contradictions.

But hold your breath! Despair no more.

Ours is a broad church

We can promise this much,

We practise what we preach.

Subscribe and enjoy thirty days free trial.

If you are not pleased with the service,

You will get your money worth

Roller coaster ride - you won't look back.

There is no need for reimbursement.

What the heck! After all

You are dead the day you are born.

Thereafter you struggle to preserve the body afloat

God bless, For long or short,

Depending on the time, the place

And the resources you are endowed with,

Together with other coincidences,

Redounding for or against.

Then finally there is a great tide,

Thingamabobs are pulled into,

And the body progresses

And transmogrifies into its elements -

Proving the Theory of Matter right,

Thus, there is indeed life after death,

If only the dead - the selfless, the righteous ones-

Those who died to save others,

Care to tell the truth.

Whether the life they lead now is

Any better than the one they left behind on earth.

© Haileselassie Girmay

17/8/2002