Poetry
Twenty Something Years On
by Marc Janssen
After “Animation” by Jon Anderson
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. |