Sitting between my father’s ashes and my sleeping mother

I consider the difficulty
of endings, the origin
of parents, their lives

before me, what repository
holds their spent youth,
whether it is the same

that holds mine,
that holds yours.
Or will.

Weren’t we,
not knowing it,
magnificent?

Didn’t we dream?
Weren’t we foolish, and
pulsing with possibility?

Flawed and earnest,
didn’t we love? We
gamboled those pastures

like colts; exuberant,
irrepressible. Any grass
was green enough.

I consider the strangeness
of hands, dexterous
fingers extruded from capable

palms, the skillful
opposable thumbs.
What we can hold;

what we cannot.

 

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Tags: aging, creative writing, impermanence, parents, poem, poetry, spirituality, time, youth