The poems in this collection-with the exception of One Day, written for Nahid on our wedding day-poured into my consciousness during my mid-seventies when I was contemplating retirement. That is a moment of transition, a time of life when it seems important to come to grips with the infinity we call God. The themes of the poems-laments for vanished times; critiques of my own life and the world, and the relation between the two, past and present; questions about what it is to be a historian in a culture that rushes so quickly to erase the past; celebrations of the unexpected love that has brightened my life in the last two decades-reflect my conscious and unconscious states of mind more consistently and directly than anything else I have written in my more than five decades as an author. I hope they will resonate with readers, old and young, who already have, or soon enough will, live through the daunting changes that modern culture imposes upon successive generations.