Poetry
A man sits in a hospital’s waiting room, head in his hands. He has never prayed before.
Never thought the heavens would bend an ear, never thought he’d need them to, never thought he’d feel the urge, never thought his love of fifty years would be strung up like a marionette, tangled in a web of IV’s and oxygen tubes, never thought he’d be here,
waiting
wishing
just one last time
to hold his hand.
Oh Love! How we let the little things go.
How we think of these small gestures as chump change
compared to the whole of your greatness.
Until we are a penny short and a minute late.
Until we’d give anything for fingers tangling,
warm and soft and simple.
How we long for something to hold on to,
as Life sweeps us aside and holds us under,
without so much as a last word.
Love you are kind.
You are good.
You wrap your arms around the earth.
Your embrace vast
and indiscriminate.
Your grip is tight,
sometimes painfully so.
But it is a sobering kind of pain.
Love lets us come to,
awakens us from our years of drunken stupor.
Sometimes with a tender kiss
Or with a cold shock of grief.
The man lifts his head to the doctor come to play the messenger.
The man weeps
hot and angry tears.
But not for his Love.
He has been good to him.
It is Life that has scorned him.
Tried to rip his heart from his chest
and tell him who to give it to.
But now another man sits with head in hands.
He has come too as well.
He breaks open the bird cage with his gavel,
and sets love flying.
And us with it.
Now we are free.
Free to live
Free to love
However
and whomever
we please.
