Uncharted Passage You are the flagship -- gladly or not we travel in your wake. So long as the masthead bears your colours we hold course. Though you founder, almost, in this uncharted passage Where storm and shallows threaten alike. Though we stand-to helpless While half a lifetime's cargo is jettisoned and the flotsam Of memory; the silks and the bric-a-brac, float out, On an ebb tide. Yet, so long as you endure we are young. So long as you hoard a remnant of self above water, A frail bulwark survives. In late middle-age We remain, all of us -- somebody's children, still. -- Mary Dorcey