If You Are Reading This Poem

This amazing picture was made for me by Ella at Ella's Edge. I usually hate my picture but this one suits me right down to the ground. Ellie, you are super-talented!

If you are reading this poem,
some day
in the years ahead,
when I am gone,
passed into the corridors of time
and memory,
my voice and cackle silenced,

you may find me, still,
in all these words
I've left behind.

Will you read them?
Will you finally begin
to understand
this wayfarer,
plodding pilgrim,
who slogged through swamps
but also soared, at times,
through the bluest of skies,
always looking up
to count the clouds,
to nod my kinship to trees
with their dancing branches,
a pilgrim whose feet
stayed on the ground
but whose heart so often
tried to fly free
of its moorings.

Take this book.
Go sit beside the riverbank
and turn each page,
where I have recorded
the moments of joy
and heartbreak,
of love for this suffering planet
and its confused humanity.
Listen to the song of the river
that companioned me
through my last years,
whose voice was surrogate
for my beloved too-far-from-me sea,
my heart always keening
for the cry of the gull,
the smell of sea-salt and fog,
the sight of that long sandy beach
stretching ahead of me to Forever.

You may notice
the twinned themes
of gratitude and grief,
reflect upon the rocky road
and all the losses-
so many starting overs
with scarcity of resources,
but no shortage
of indomitable will.

In later years
my shoulders became
less able to bear the weight
of all that had been lost
at such great cost.
Grief finally caught me
by the throat and
made me pay
for all the times
I stayed too strong
to grieve and, finally,
I shed a century
of accumulated tears
that could no longer
be denied.
I grieved it all:
my childhood,
my youth that fell into brutal hands,
my store by the sea, my livelihood,
my trust, all gone.

Mid-life, one glorious leap
to the  western sea
and ten years of knowing

how joyous life

can be.

I grieved my leaving of the sea,
the decade of making do 

with so much less
and, finally, and hardest of all,
my wolf-dog.
With his passing,
the last link to
those glorious times
was gone,
along with the one creature
on this earth
who loved

only me.

One year of tears, and more,
filling my rowboat
to the point of capsizing,
faster than I could bail,
as old griefs hopped aboard
the new and finally
found release.

Yes,  many losses,
many making do's.
But always, too,
great thankfulness,
for all that is,
for all that there has been.
Remember, if you will,
my unceasing gratitude
for life's beauty,
for eyes with which to see it,
for feet to walk me across the forest floor
and for my great love, the song of the sea,
which showed my soul a vastness of vision
it could never  have encompassed
on its own.

If you are reading this poem,
you may wish that we had talked more
about the real stuff,
didn't leave so much unsaid.
But never worry.
In the heart and in one's spirit,
as we increase in wisdom,
one knows what is intended,
one understands everything
and lets go of the small wounds
and the big,
under the over-arching canopy
of comprehending
that every soul mine touched
while I was here
was meant to find me.
Each child who came to
life through me
was meant to be my child
and, through each one of you,
I grew in different ways
that were possible only through
having been your mom.

Some souls have
a more difficult passage;
such has been ours
on this planet.
But in one lifetime,
I feel like
I have lived
at least ten lives,
each life one decade long.
In each, I grew and changed,

transcended and transformed.

Finally, if you are reading this poem,
know "there is peace
that surpasses understanding".
Towards the end, one forgets
all the pain,
and remembers mostly the good:
the laughter, the sunsets,
the glorious adventure,
the pilgrimage,
the growth and the glory.
One remembers the love
and those one has loved
and forgets all the might-have-beens,
in the compassion of understanding
that nothing could possibly
have happened
any differently,
given my beginnings,
and there came a time
when I would not have had it
any other way.

If you are reading this poem,
put this book down now,
and do me one final favor:
Look around you. Just look.
What do you see?
Are you sitting by the shore at sunset?
Are you on a forest trail, leaning against
the comforting trunk of an ancient cedar?
Are you by the river,
listening to the roar of the rapids,
waiting for the salmon to arrive?
Turn your eyes around you
in a complete circle.
Love all that you see.
Look at it all
with brand new eyes.
Look at it, for me.

Whoa, I found this in my drafts section and cant remember if I posted it a while back, or not. I wrote it when I thought I would never be able to return to my beloved Tofino. Now there will have to be another stanza added on, down the road............because here comes joy, again, grinning like a big old friendly dog and heading my way.