When We Finally Get Old. Poem by RIC BASTASA

THE MOST important thing is the birth of that child.
Unlike the rest, when it arrived here it only offered
the happiness of its own silence.
It came like a footfall
upon a soft grass on the hill.
THe SUN SOFT in its glow hid behind
a castle.
When the moon came that evening
The stars danced.
It was you, that child in the mother's arms
the only moon in her eyes

BETWEEN all these hallowed layers of
affections
is distance, always distance, like pillars
not meeting because if they do
the House shall fall into
bits, so many bits, like sands in the
shores of your mind.

Time is always unforgiving. The sentences of wrinkles
loosened
our hold for each others' affections.

Goodbyes are too many. Pains are unaccountable.
We pray that we must become forgetting species.

There is only one tomorrow left and we keep on asking for names,
places, and dates.