The Future's All That Matter

I not unlike many others tend to remember the past And say back then how times were better and the good days do not last Always thinking of long dead years and dreading to look ahead And what I'm writing of this instant by so many has been said. Boyhood years I still remember long ago and far away In the meadows of my childhood the sweet scent of new mown hay And the warm lamp of Summer glowing in the mid day sky And the swallows I still see them and hear them twittering as they fly. In the shallows of river pool brown trout basking in the sun And the little dipper singing on rock where the rapids run These are things I still remember such fond memories with me stay Yet we cannot live forever back there in our childhood day. No we cannot live forever in the times forever gone For the future's all that matter and the clock keeps ticking on And we can keep the old memories till they go into decay Though the boy of forty years back is now looking old and gray. There are many others like me who say the old days are best But the fledgeling bird of Summer when he leaves his mother's nest Flies off to another woodland to stake his own territory And he doesn't yearn for what he once knew but then he is truly free. The fields that I knew in childhood are still in my memory And the past I tend to cling to or does the past cling to me? But what's gone is gone forever and the past years are long dead And the future's all that matter for the future is ahead.