Even such is time, that takes in trust
 Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
 And pays us but with earth and dust;
 Who, in the dark and silent grave,
 When we have wandered all our ways,
 Shuts up the story of our days:
 But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
 My God shall raise me up, I trust.

I’m 59 years old, and though a lifetime avid reader (mostly history) I really hadn’t often “clicked” with a poem and so hadn’t done much exploration of the genre before stumbling onto your site a couple of years ago.

While on what was supposed to be a ‘round the world bicycle trip - Odyssey 2000 - I missed a turn in the Drakensberg range in the Transvaal in South Africa and augured into a mountainside, breaking my pelvis, sacrum and some ribs. End of trip for me, and after surgery I spent a couple of months living in the home of a Boer couple in Mpumalanga. In a way the accident wasn’t a completely bad thing, in that our discussions provided each of us insights into the others’ country we didn’t have before and I got to know some wonderful people.

While I was recovering they took me one day to a used bookstore, where Petra found a 19th century anthology of English poetry and gave it to me. I stumbled onto Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Even Such is Time” and in my near-death experience PTSD frame of mind it struck a deep chord. I loved this poem so much I even posted most of it on my country-store website along with a local photograph of a spot which always reminds me of the poem: http://www.dayvillemerc.com/time.htm

— Steve Cookinham