Have you ever watched
As the crawl of time
And the sprawl of distance
And the weight of responsibilities
And the busyness of the mundane
Turned dearest friends
Into acquaintances?
I looked about myself one day
Like a shell-shocked soldier
And wondered how this happened.
How did I end up here alone?
As if I wasn’t at the helm
Of my own life
And this was all an unpleasant surprise
Rather than the result of
The choices I made
You and I
Are two different streams
Each flowing in its own course
Carrying different debris and trace elements
Our different sources
Influencing our composition
But here our courses have met
In this peaceful pooling
Our confluence
There are times when floods upstream
Send us crashing into one another
Churning up the waters
The currents fighting and clashing
But there are also times
When we meet so beautifully
So smoothly gliding along into one another’s path
And we find that we are of one accord
And that two can be better than one
That the waters are fresher and sweeter
At their confluence
As we drove along the winding, shadowed street
I gazed at the sky, criss-crossed with branches
Flashing by, blurred by speed and motion
And I said I would write a poem
About the moon, hanging like a golden coin in the dark
You didn’t say much, because the thought
Of poems was painful to you
No golden coins could make up for
The price you paid in the reading of poems
I cannot un-write them, cannot un-feel them
You cannot forget them, though you wish otherwise
And the words hang between us
Like a moon in the sky
Like a curtain of rain
Like a frozen memory
And I ended up lying after all
I didn’t write of a golden moon
But of you
If the sun goes dark tomorrow
as it rises in the east
and we plummet into shadow–
Should the earth’s revolving cease–
If the oceans break their borders
and submerge the mountaintops–
If the ground gives way beneath us–
If the timeline simply stops–
In the darkness and confusion
In the chaos and the flame
Let me feel your hand in mine
Let me hear you speak my name
And that will be enough
to help me bravely face the end
We’ll get through the unbearable
Just stay with me, my friend
Woman With a Pen 