The Present Is What Matter

I hear the babbling of distant waters that flow through places from here far away
And the migrant redwings chirping on bare hedgerows on a Winter's morn when the frosted fields are gray
And the shy brown hare to keep her body warm across the high field running up and down
In this great Land I'll always be a migrant and I'd be a stranger now in my Hometown.

The past is gone the present is what matter we only can live in the here and now
Though sometimes in my wildest flights of fancy I hear the robin on the birch tree bough
He singing in the sunshine of the morning when lush fields wear their wildflowers of the May
The gift to visualize it is in everybody how near my past to me does seem today.

But life goes on for me as it does for everybody and little ever seems to stay the same
And perhaps in the Hometown now I'd be a stranger and few would even know of me by name
We make way for another generation and people like the Seasons come and go
But still the rill it babbles to the river and the river on towards the big ocean flow.

The World it surely will get on without me when in Nature's bosom somewhere I will lay
And then it will not matter that much to me if others good or evil of me say
And though we only can live in the present and the past has gone forever it would seem
In my flights of fancy I can hear the moorhen call in the still pool of the babbling stream.