A poem about turning fifty

I came across this poem just in the last few days, and it fits the experience of approaching fifty perfectly for me. I especially love the line "when really there's no one in charge", the idea that we've spent fifty years trying to figure out the rules and get it right, and actually, the rules are just randomly thrown together. Maybe at fifty, we can start to find our own rules to live by.


Half Century
by Adam Thorpe

The years are always something we think of
as vaguely surprising, guests that come and go
who might have been expected to hang around,

entertaining our disappointments, letting us forget.
We count them every so often like marks against us,
or a row of sacks bulging with what we can't

yet throw away and wonder (after a certain age)
how we'll ever manage without them.
The truth is, they don't stay. Fifty

seems too much, you say, but remember
they have gone; what's left is not to be weighed
but savoured, like love. We want

to keep them back for some unfocussed good,
one minute worrying about being too young,
guessing what the rules, invented

in our absence, demand of us; and then we see
that all along the game was being cooked up
at every instant to give us that impression

when really no one's in charge and there's nothing
but a vague skein like silk or torchlight
connecting this to that - the present spiced only because

the past's no longer suffused, the future not yet
seasoned. So we'll drink to us, not to time's tribunal,
and braid each year with hugs like an old friend.