It Has Not Been Such a Long Time: A Poem

 

It has not been such a long time

That I should forget

You lying in the orchard

Naked and unafraid;

Or the tenderness

Of Cummings’ verse

You gave me then, and

I now

Carry in my heart;

Or, the reach of your arms

Reflected in the mirror

That has one hundred times

Closed the distance

Between us

 

It has not been such a long time

But a life time

To grasp

the cosmology borne of the intensely felt,

That flung the stars across the darkness,

Of an intimate yet infinite universe,

Shining epiphanies,

We now see,

Their origins,

Both gentle and violent obscured.

So, they beckon us to name them all,

That we may remember who we are

And what we have become.

 

David Heaney, 2017