Maybe you saw or heard this poem already on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. I’ve been sorting through all my stacked up emails and just read it and thought it was so wonderful—and appropriate to the changing seasons—that I had to share it. Read it again, even if you’ve already read it once!
Now
by Greg Watson
I told you once when we were young that
we would someday meet again.
Now, the years flown past, the letters
unwritten, I am not so certain.
It is autumn. There are toothaches hidden
in this wind, there are those determined
to bring forth winter at any cost.
I am resigned to dark blonde shadows
at stoplights, lost in the roadmaps of leaves
which point in every direction at once.
But I am wearing the shirt you stitched
two separate lifetimes ago. It is old
and falling to ash, yet every button blooms
the flowers of your design. I think of this
and I am happy, to have kissed
your mouth with the force of language,
to have spoken your name at all.
"Now" by Greg Watson from The Distance Between Two Hands. © March Street Press, 2008. (buy now)