Kindergarten graduation
Is the end of a beginning.
Now we start the numbered grades,
Dancing through the years of grace.
Ends require celebration,
Rituals of well-earned winning,
Giving kids the accolades
A dancer needs to keep the pace.
Rejoice, then, in the raw sensation,
The shyness bursting, rapture spinning.
Eventually, the glory fades,
Nor can it run so long a race.

Shadow is my ever-present shadow,
Having little in her life but me.
Affection is in her a true vocation,
Destined as she is for a relation
Of which love is both salvager and sea,
Windswept world and oft-recited credo.

Children who die are not really gone,
But go to a place that is something like home,
Where they sleep the deep sleep, as quiet as stone,
Until we can join them when our lives are done.

Children who die are not really dead,
But just like good children tucked into bed,
Wait the long wait while we go ahead
Till our tales are all told and our tears are all shed.
Children who die feel no pleasure or pain
In the place where they wait till they see us again,
And all of us dance in a world washed with rain
Where the sun shines so brightly no sorrows remain.

But darkness reveals what we cannot see.
Only truths are visible by day.
Night removes the excitable veils.
Nothing is the field upon which light fails.
If our lives wend a similar way,
Eventually, we become what we cannot be.

Darkness is the glowing field of light,
As though in meadows filled with wildflowers,
Vast and lovely in the midnight hours,
Each blossom bloomed throughout the winter night.
Know there is no sense without delight.
Although perception lie beyond our powers,
The choice of happiness is always ours.
However dark and passionate our plight,
Yet love remains our first, most precious right.

Searching for significance,
One finds the bloody trail
Leading to a sea of bones
Along the eastern shore.
In the end there's no defense
For something that must fail,
As politicians work the phones
To dredge up one vote more.

All great ideas eventually,
Besieged, must turn to those
Who make a livelihood of death
And cherish what is real.

For greatness, large or small, must be
A burden that bestows
Upon these loose-limbed lords of breath
A wound time cannot heal.

Wedding Poems