Here’s A Toast

Here’s a toast to fellowship and those who’ve gone before
Who walked the world and spoke their lines back in days of yore
Who did their best and did their worst and made for us this age
So we could take the story up and write another page.

Here’s a toast to loneliness, to times of troubled strife
To days when woes seem close at hand in an embattled life.
When who you are and what you do defines the world to come
And those who take and those who give are seen for what they’ve done

Here’s a toast to absent friends, the ones you’ve never met
Who do their deeds on your behalf, but you still forget
Or perhaps you just don’t care to see what’s being done,
To keep this world the way it is while you play in the sun.

E.M. Swift-Hook