Loss of Love

The loss of love and youth and fire came raiding, riding, a horde of plunderers on one caparisoned steed, sucking up the sun drops, trampling the green shoots of my carefully planted years. The evidence: thickened waist and leathery thighs, which triumph over my fallen insouciance. After fifty-five the arena has changed. I must enlist new warriors. My resistance, once natural as raised voices, importunes in the dark. Is this battle worth the candle? Is this war worth the wage? May I not greet age without a grouse, allowing the truly young to own the stage?