You Reading This

Dear S —

This letter has sat in my head, in my heart, for too long.

I think of you often and jot silent notes that I never seem to send.

So this is to say: I’m thinking of you. You hold a place in my heart where time sits still and daily life matters little. I’ve missed that sense of suspension, where worries are placed gently away.

These last few years have been difficult in such varied and complicated ways. The stress and strain of the pandemic, compounded with racial injustice, economic turmoil, international upheaval . . . and that’s not even our personal challenges of sickness and aging, sadness and defeat. More than ever we see the dominoes of our lives tip, collide, fall away.

How do we keep on? How do you?

I’d like to say poetry has helped me float but in this last year my well has gone dry. I’m now facing the fact that poetry is in my past, a person I use to be.

Maybe it is love that gets us through these difficult days. It’s hardly an original thought — but there’s a reason cliches are called just that: there’s truth in the refrain.

Maybe it is the small gratitudes that sustain. This morning the sun bursts through a month of damp days and I am suddenly restored. Hope springs in small ways and I am larger for it. As the sun moves across the room I’m warmed by the memory of a Stafford line — how sunlight creeps along a shining floor.

I am warmed by the memory of you and I drinking coffee and tea in that cozy coffeeshop, playing Bananagrams while the rain and wind thrashed our small town and we, safe inside, laughed and sighed. How simple time seems as it ticks along, how complex the memory of days past.

I am not waiting for time to show some better thoughts. I am here, now, in my head, my heart, and on this page, thankful for you and our friendship.

With love,

Drew

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

 

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

 

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life  —

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

— William Stafford