Mortality

I feel stressed and I don’t know why
Could it be the end of my childhood and the sudden, unwanted entrance
Into the world of adulthood
that has claimed the lives and dreams of many before me?
Could it be the fear that I don’t know what lies beyond?
Is the fear of the beyond making me uneasy?
I’m no psychologist, but I feel that suddenly my life
Is turning into something that I have wanted for so long,
Yet dread now that I have arrived there.
God must think humans are his most pathetic creatures
Longing for manhood,
And, upon attaining it, would willingly give it back.
Does the tree grow tall and long to be a sapling?
Does the mountain wish he were a pebble?
Does the vast ocean, strong and gentle, yearn to return
To the lakes and streams from which it ebbed?
How can we be so selfish as to take what we have been given
And throw it back? Mortality?
That has to be the cause of this endless torment;
The one problem science has worked so frivolously to halt
But fails.
The one thing we posses that the great forces of this world will never have.
Mortality.
Suddenly we find ourselves, starving, naked, filthy. Mortal.
At the end of our lives, we have no other.
Unlike the militaristic trees of the forests, the titanic oceans, and the colossal mountains that loom over our heads,
we are mortal, and it is all we will ever know.
Just as immortality belongs only to the earth,
and God; so must we suffer this curse, that no amount of empathy will
solve. Mortality.