For him it was not a matter of years
Or even centuries, but wide floods of time
And the ancient heaviness and ache
In his corded arms that had become
Part of the grand scheme the gods had made.
Now if they should send a cruel head wind
How could it help or hinder or change things
Except to divide all time in his memory
Into two equal portions? So evenly gray
Everything looked where he rowed, if any
Radiance flickered a moment among the dead,
On the face of a Cleopatra or a Bernhardt,
The ferryman never would have noticed it.

Yet he did notice and thought it strange
When the dead began arriving in such numbers:
They come in hundreds, sometimes thousands now
Who used to come in dozens, long ago.
His job was not to count, it was to row.
But then for a long time there was no traffic,
And this is uncommon, he thought, for the gods
To send no one down from earth for a decade—
Though gods in their wisdom know what’s best.
Then one man walked the pier. His little shade
Sat shivering on the skiff as it pushed off.
Only one passenger: the gods know best.
The weary ferryman rowed on and on
And the river sighed the way Grief in the dawn
Of ages moaned and sighed among her sisters,
A song that could not die like the echoes
Of human sorrow failing on the earth,
Though it was old as Time and Charon’s pain.

From the slow river the boat loomed to the coast
of Hades. The lone passenger stepped ashore
As Charon turned his boat toward the world.
“But wait, I am the last,” said the new ghost
Alarmed by Charon’s face against the sky—
For no one had ever made him smile before,
No one had ever seen the ferryman cry.

—Daniel Mark Epstein