for the Feast of St. Francis
3 October 2021
- my 60th birthday
There is a language we share:
the air that together we breathe,
beneath the open sky!
Who could have known that would be enough
to bridge such an enormous gap?
But even the diary from one year ago
does attest:
“Rounding the corner,
and there you are!
-- We share this life,
though one is fractional
to the other
-- We share this home;
though our dwellings differ,
we are only liminally separate
-- In truth, we are together."
Of another shared aspect,
--that of torpor--
our intersectional relationship
reaches the overarching conclusion:
Choose life!
For, suspended animation is merely life incremental,
slowed to the blessing of the molto adagio,
where the dream that animates us bids us all to live
to each newly dawning day,
slowing each passing moment of awareness
so that we may all be the moment together, and in time.
For how long, my friend,
shall we bless one another’s company,
in the newly dawning om of day?
You greet me by landing on the tomato cage,
despite that fruit being no longer in due season.
Only in the most foreshortened sense of being
can my three-score years coincide with your own
-- yet will I delight in your special greeting,
in the beauteous now that we have,
in the blessing to have been truly seen
and to also have truly seen,
in the mutuality of seeing and acknowledging,
of knowing,
and of caring,
and seeking to live cooperative within that notice--
yea, let this, what we have, be our deepening moment
for as long as providence may bless us both
with such patience and perspicacity,
with such sacred and familial union,
as is that rounding of the corner,
to be with you,
where you are with me
and we are joyously
together.
© 2021 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.com
