46 (actually 52) and counting

I was 17 and Bern was 14 when we met in Latin class. I was thinking of going to Shimer College in Chicago and they wanted a year of language. Latin was the only language taught in my high school, so I signed up. I didn't go to Shimer, but I met Bern, a Freshman while I was a Senior.

A month or two later, we kissed under the bleachers at a Gary High School football game. I was hooked, really. Six years later we were married.

Labor Day (September 5th) is our 46th anniversary. I don't usually share things I write for Bern, but thought I would share the poem I wrote her for this anniversary.

The Poem I Can’t Write

For days now I’ve been trying

to write a poem that just won’t come.

It’s for our anniversary and about my love,

so it should flow out without any effort,

since I love you so very much.

But the poem is hiding from me,

peeking at me from around the corner,

avoiding me at all cost, it seems.

Page after page I throw away

(or, more accurately, erase from my computer).

Forty-six years of marriage (and years before that)

of loving you—the words should pour out,

full of passion and wonder and amazement.

This time I realized something,

my love for you isn’t something ‘out there’,

that I can examine, reflect on, put into words.

That love is in those letters in the attic.

That love has altered, changed, become incarnate.

The love I feel for you is, quite simply, me.

I am my love for you. It is my very ‘being’

That cannot be captured and enclosed in words.

That is ‘who I am’. So, I am your poem.

This poem is ‘me’, my very being, the “I” I call myself.

I am yours. Your anniversary poem….

September 5, 2016