Mayfly

You will not live past morning.

Yet you know nothing of this.

I cannot decide:

the gift,

or the grief.

 

I have been counting.

All those unreached hours.

The words still forming

in the dark of me.

The love

still learning

its own name.

 

There is a weight

to the life

still inside you

when the day

begins to lean.

 

Not the losing.

The not yet.

The still,

the still,

the still wanting,

wings drying

in the light

that is already

moving somewhere else.

 

I have stood at the edge of so many things.

Mouth open:

nothing coming.

 

It seems you do not grieve.

You simply rise

into the only morning

you will ever know,

Before falling back at last

into the water

that made you.

Complete.

Brief.

Never knowing

what you left undone.

 

And here am I,

in the long unfinished middle,

carrying the weight

of everything

I have not yet become.

Looking out

through something

that bends the light

before it even reaches me.

 

The sky.

Enormous.

This day.

Already passing…