Letting go

I play the songs over and over, so I could
hold on to theirtime, but the frayed roots
untangle the ties that bind. My music

is not their music. Songs that stroke
at my heart is not what they hear.
They’ve composed new lyrics so quickly,

never imagining that their rhythm
would surge so far from the confines
of my making, the safe borders

within my musical score. The passage pervasive,
confusing, but it was not my intention.
Hard to detach my limbs, to surrender the trees

to the forest, the saplings I once thought
would never grow past my clavicles;
the cradle where leaves turned autumn,
but I only ever saw spring.

“My patience, resolutions and beliefs are tested to the limits – sometimes daily.”^*

Right at this moment one of my challenges is the constant, tuneless whistling from my elder son. When my boys were babies it was getting them to sleep or trying to figure out why they were crying. On any given day now, it might be squabbling, fighting, teasing, screaming, shouting or rudeness. Who’d be a parent? We might well question ourselves after the event, but we can’t very well put them back! Just how we find those inner resources, how we constantly demand more of ourselves, how we keep marching up that hill with a smile on our face and gladness in our heart at the sight of our ‘babies’ is one of life’s mysteries.

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