Garnet Rogers' "The Lost Ones"

To those special ones we miss and didn't appreciate and celebrate enough:

The shadows beneath the trees do grow,
The sun's embers die away.
The hush of night falls o'er these hills
At the turning of the day.
It was on nights like this we'd gather here,
Brief crowded hours to fill
In kinship and good harmony,
In my dreams, I can see us still:

By candlelight, by whiskey's glow,
Each shining upturned face
Would raise a voice, would raise a glass
In those wild and tumultuous days,
When we neither cared, nor lacked for time,
When all the world was wild and new.
Nights heady as a glass of wine,
And our mornings filled anew.

So it was, those wild and scattered years,
We reckoned not the cost,
But those who light burned truest and bright
Would be numbered amongst the lost.
And on chance-met street, or crowded bar
We few, now left behind, would raise
Not a glass, but a rueful brow
At the passing of our kind.

So now I stand beneath these garden walls,
The moon above me wheels.
The stars are cast through the field of night,
And the wind like a drunkard reels
Through the empty gate and the silent house,
The windows dark and blind
But what slips like sand through desperate hand
Is treasured yet within the mind.

For those lost ones still before me stand
All present as of old,
In the tangled skein of passing years
They shine like threads of gold.

So here's a health to those no longer near,
And a glass to those departed
Who yet shine on through our darkening years
The brave and gentle-hearted.