Praise our routines —
the dog walked at dawn, coffee to the left
at the place of work, soaking oatmeal overnight,
short doze in the afternoon, the Sunday
morning call to fading parent, breakfast
with radio, the lowering book at night, last embrace
then sleepy turning away,
morning greeting mumbled into the neck.

Praise them for they are most of our life,
the hard and the easy part,
the bit where we slog, the bit
where we are coasting, and knows which
but you in honest moments?

Praise too those times
we go off our rails,
the veggie splurging brown sauce on a bacon roll
and biting, astonished, into a life
she didn’t know was also hers;
the man rising from bed after midnight,
to drive to the coast where he sits
in the car listening to a foreign radio station
make perfect sense of the multiple moons
colliding in the surf;
a summer dawn spent pacing outside Intensive Care,
still in slippers, drinking Bovril and telling strangers
about the life that is becoming
something you once knew.

Praise the moments we haven’t a clue,
they may be the only answer
to a question we never knew we’d asked.
Yet I’m picturing days like stolid logs
lined up in the rain;
with full swing of the heart’s axe,
aim to make kindling of those few
times we truly know what we are doing,
when we go with the grain
of our own life, and know it
as wood knows the cutting edge
and the true of the haft
only as it splits wide open.