Poetry

How Should We Live Our Lives?


How Should We Live Our Lives?
 
With love
and trepidation
sign our letters?

Conceive a child only
after much forethought
or none at all?

Follow the dialectical
heart to world’s end
and feel it

tighten, a muscle,
to fill again,
unfettered? My daughter,

as you grow up I
will grow old,
a fact that shocks

you, even at age three.
Love has no part in this.
Only the sea

is free of such calculations,
and sometimes a person
too, running

into the sea in late summer when
the water remembers just barely
what it was to be cold.