Poetry

Twenty Something Years On
by Marc Janssen

After “Animation” by Jon Anderson
Somewhere there is a piano playing
Low and soft;
It plays of green covered hills under a kind yellow sun.
The sound comes and goes and it passes through you.
It is a song about us, you and me;
It is about life and loss and beginnings,
And twenty years on
I can hear it as easy now as on that day.

It was something I didn’t know if I wanted to do,
An institutional room of blood and pain and fear
That housed hours as terrible as I had dreamed.

Then you were there.
Delicate kicking legs
Heart beats and clocks to her first day
Her first sound in delicate shells
And red fingers opening and closing and opening and closing and opening . . . 

The moment I looked at her face
That minute under the sun
                 With us together in space,
A moment of more than history
More than mere discovery.

I can still remember,
Holding a bundled riddle
Calmly looking up at me, “What now?”
If I hold my arms in a certain way I can still feel.

What will I do now?
Now that I have to love.
Wet skin and wispy hair--
It is the scariest thing in the smallest package;
Breathing, and after a while
With a powerful yawn
Slowly surrendered herself to sleep
And I held her in white blankets . . . 

How can I succumb so completely
Be so capably captured?

Tell me of something our forefathers tried
I’ll tell you nothing compares to the birth of a child.
Men are such amateurs
We disappear when faced with that awesome power of creation.

And I was there
Beside my loved one, my wife.
I didn’t know what to say then.
I don’t know what to say now.