A Toast to What Was and What Will Be

 

To commemorate all the suffering and hard-won joys

Jewels of our deepest breaths & greatest thoughts

Heart-beats of our luring love & spiritual faith

The ruby warmth of summer suns and rays of gold

 

The comfort of misery and the unity of experience

Delight of gifts unexpected and timely surprise

Friends who roamed the contours of my being

Partners who knew the kindness behind my walls

 

The sacred grief which drove me to create

To commemorate the struggles and the growing pains

Of each momentous step of the decades

Each year a holy death of who I once pretended to be

 

The masquerades and the compromises

That we may be happy and forget our doom

The grief so idle in our careless youth

And the consciousness of our fabled maturity.