Season’s Song

(First Light)

Season’s Song

By David Solie

Here or gone, the gravity 
Of holiday memories
Brings us face to face
With love’s blunt
Truth: our “moment” 
With our parents
Has passed, gone
Forever along with 
Our childhood and
It’s frantic dreams
Trapped in the emotional 
Incubator of our family
Leaving us clueless, 
To the compression 
Of time that is silently 
Repackaging decades into blinks, 
The dense, sad verses
Of the unavoidable loss
We carry until the end,
It’s not that we are ungrateful,
Mostly we’re shocked and wounded 
By a perverse notion 
We could have and should 
Have done more at some point,
Longing for that mythical 
Second chance for a spontaneous
Thank you or one more cup
Of coffee and conversation
Instead of so much
Doing, always doing 
For doing’s sake.
It’s an epiphany embedded 
In our postmortem of caregiving
Along with a list  of illogical 
Regrets, forgetting that 
The best we can do 
Was all we ever had, a refrain 
That brings our song back
To earth with its imperfect
Love from which we
Must make do…