Love Poem No.25
I know living with me is hard.
And loving me even harder.
Others see only from their distances
and enhance my frame
with their own desires creating
a man to their liking.
But you know closer.
You know the stubbornness
I have inherited from my
father’s side, like a succession of
breached baby boys whose collar
bones had to be broken
in order to gain the world
we steeled ourselves early
and have no tongue for pain.
I thought this might improve over
years. Maybe it has, a little.
I suppose that’s why I write poems
or whatever these things are called.
I’ve thought at times you might leave
and I would not blame you.
There is too much blame in the world
already, and it is so unbeautiful.
But you still stay asking me daily
in a thousand variations to point to the
face on the pain scale and say.
I say I love you, and we go on.
Sounds like marriage to me!
Oh, so true. Seeing this especially just now as my husband patiently helps me and cares for me as I try to learn how to live in a new way caring for my mother while holding a full-time job I can’t quit. What is this new normal? I thank God every day for someone who is willing to give me the space to figure out the answer to that question even though it seems to cut him out of our shared life for far too long at times. Such grace as “we go on.”
Yes, Beth, I think the grace is fleshed out in the going on – sometimes in spite of rather than because of.
Yes. My mother’s life mantra is “do the next thing” — because in doing the next thing, you open the door to grace, beauty, love.
Wow…good.