I have been awake on and off all night. It is my pattern. I write at night when it is quiet. I try to sleep but my legs sometimes refuse to let me rest. It seems this past year has been relentless with issues in the world, overseas and at home. I envy those who seem to have normal lives of family and friends and wonder to myself how is it that the time has slipped past so quickly when I was not watching. I wrote the following short poem. It will be in the collection I will be printing later on this year. Later on,…..how  we trust that phrase. There are children in the neighborhood who are full of life and hope and I wish for them all the good that life has to offer. The couples across the street with young children, how lucky they are. Their lives were not stained by what so many of us have suffered and I hope they never are or will be touched by the violence seen by some of us. A million confessions will not wash life clean for some of us. As a friend said to me recently, “It is what it is.”  And yet I wonder. I wonder about the “before” and I wonder about the  “future”. I wonder about the smiles on the children’s faces and hope they will never lose the spirit that brings them such joy and yet….yet as I look closely I find disharmony in everything around me. Time has moved past and I am left with memories and regrets and pain and wishes that the world and I could be different…but it is as it is and such that nothing I think in memory can change the past.

Leaves

How like leaves we are

Born fresh and clean

Then weathered with time

Turning brittle to fall away

And then to simply disappear.             9/17/14  Copyright 2014 Gordon Kuhn