Monday, February 11, 2013

In the end, we talk about endings.

A gathering of new friends, each
just not sure what the other might bring
to the table.

How was the visit with your daughter?

The answer goes somewhere else:
Who won the chowder contest?

We came to enjoy the prize-winning
chowder after our book meet
feeling immunized against food memories
like daughters tap-dancing around hot cookie trays
and spilled tea.

And your last doctor's visit?

I'll know more after the tests results.
I keep taking my pills and try to lose more weight.

We  laugh, about daughters
escape fiction, skinny doctors who
read only charts.

In the end, we end up talking
about what
it feels like to count days
so close to the end.




19 comments:

  1. Beautiful. You nailed the evening so well, I feel like I might have been there. I need to find a book group. I just hope that the group I hope to find is made of some younger women. That would be refreshing.

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  2. mmm...reality breaks in...but in the end i think in facing it together it brings comfort and meaning to those closing days you know...smiles.

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    1. Yes, facing things together, knowing there is comfort in sharing. There is also a sense of finality to that togetherness too.

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  3. Your way with words is confoundingly touching!

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    1. I'm coming to poetry late in my life, discovering a sudden comfort in stating what everyone I know feels but does not utter.

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  4. Whew. Not that got to me. I wish I didn't understand it so well, if you understand what I mean.
    Beautiful, Rosaria.

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  5. Socker punch-line! (Albeit so quietly delivered.)

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  6. You say “a gathering of new friends” and that is good that you have new friends. Sometimes, it is hard to have new friends. Because of your last post we are going to San Francisco. I found an old address book with a couple of names of friends I had not heard since 1970 – I looked up their names on the Web (isn’t the Web wonderful) and called them. They remembered us well and both invited us to visit them for a meal. Friends from the 60s! and here in Georgia where I have lived for decades I have no friends – different attitude I guess, different ways, ideas and thoughts – so not easy to make new friends.

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  7. This is one of those poems that once it sinks in (and it doesn't take long to do that) it leaves an indelible mark on you. Many thanks.

    Greetings from London.

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  8. Like Sally, I had a real sense of being there as I read your poem, Rosaria. it really gets to the essence of this time of life and a newfound sense of the limits of time. Beautiful, bittersweet, wonderful!

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  9. Sounds a bit like my spouses book club. They read and discuss differently from me. She is also a bit unhappy with these choices. But they there is bridge, Kiwanis, church ladies, Red Hatters and other too numbers to mention. For me its my GSD and long hikes. I talk . He listens and life goes on....:)

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  10. This is very touching. New friends become good friends over intimate conversation.

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  11. You captured the mood so beautifully.

    Gatherings, friends, talks about books, health, weather, food, the mundane; and slowly conversation drifting towards the feelings, the fears, what's on the heart...
    Friends (and family) who listen, who hear, who understand and care, who cry and dance and laugh with us, that's what we need, that's what it is all about.

    May you be always blessed with wonderful friends, Rosaria.

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  12. It's so good to have these kinds of friends while nearing the end...they become more precious with each passing day...at the end of each day, as I cross through the date on my calendar, I say to myself...one less day to be here...and then I remember that everyone comes to the end of their days...there's some comfort in that.

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