Why did I not grab every moment
and make it sing,
look into people’s faces and find stories there
to take me into my old age.
We don’t take the time,
Do we?
Blithely we pass unexplored roads,
agonizing instead
about the trappings of our lives,
the matched sets of things.
What will we leave?
Fragments of ourselves,
not the real thing:
The thing underneath it all
that makes our hearts beat,
gives breath to our dearest,
our sweetest selves.
That —
that which is
the best of us,
lies dormant somehow,
becoming irrevocably lost
in our blind rush toward
the rest.
Why did I not grab every moment
and make it sing?
A sequence of my poems has been published in a hardcover book entitled The Music of Leaving Poems by Tricia McCallum