“Our very life depends on continuous acts of beginning. But these beginnings are out of our hands; they decide themselves.
Beginning precedes us, creates us. There is nothing to fear in the act of beginning.
More often than not it knows the journey ahead better than we ever could."
John O’Donohue


16 February 2015

10

When you stumble from bed this morning--
that way you do
with the night's dream journeys
stirring at your heels,
an improbable teaching on your tongue,
twigs and sand and wizardry
tangled in your hair--
you will claim a decade.

While I wait,
my prayers for you still
come so swift and furious
that they trip over each other,
and I am forced to concede
again
that I have no claim over your destiny,
not even a petitionary one.

The day you were born,
sibling to three whose lifetimes
began and ended in the womb,
your heart
(still today so tender it cannot bear suspense)
recoiled from the drama of delivery.

You became in that moment
and remain
not my reward for tortured patience,
but an ethereal thing,
spirit in boy form,
arriving at its own pleasure.