What is it that you’d want to leave behind?

In the face of social media addictions and people who eat into our lives with pointless battles, poet and artist Frieda Hughes asks: what do we want to put into our lives that is real and positive?

EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

How do you want to live your one and only precious life?

Do you think yourself immortal, while becoming meaningless

Through meaningless pursuits as if your hours are endless?

If next Tuesday were to be your last day on earth,

What would you want to achieve by lights out?

Would you binge-watch Instagram and Netflix

Until your eyes bulged and your neck kinks?

Or dangle your legs over the edge of the Grand Canyon

With a total stranger and a bottle of champagne, toasting the sunrise?

Would you take your neighbours to court over a fence line,

Or call them round to talk it over with a bottle of wine?

Would you string out every argument, intransigent,

Because your ego is attached to the outcome,

Or would you exchange your spite and jealousies for generosity?

If you gathered up the minutes of your time

Spent mindlessly scrolling online, and counted the months

They have become, and all the little wars you have begun

That whittle down the lives of others – including mine,

What accumulated actions would describe you,

And what is it that you’d want to leave behind?