While there is still time

Last year for a poetry jam I memorized The Mower by Philip Larkin.  Today, Eamonn Fitzgerald writes that the horror and tragedy of the Virginia Tech killings drives home the  urgency of its command. 

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)