Her friends who have toddlers around the same age exclaim in wonder at how rapidly they're learning language—more cereal, no, cuddle, reading! Sometimes when she looks at them she's reminded of when she was a young mother, learning to love her new mother- body even as she poured herself out to her children. She's grateful they don't regard her as merely an older woman who now and again stands outside looking at the moon while the fig tree wraps its arms around her. How does one regard the future as more than the approach of a limit, more than the place of reckoning (joy and heartbreak, reproach and remorse)? In this life there's so much we owe. But what is life if not spent the way we weep unabashed, the way we give until even the crumbs fill the mouths of birds?
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
