Amateur Dramatics

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
(Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett)

For twenty-five years I've carried that sentence inside me. A giggling, ramshackle Pozzo in a cream fur coat at the local theatre. But the years pass as he/I recited -

- we grow up. I stop doing amateur dramatics. I become a writer. I sit on a train through a green corridor. My father dies. My daughter is nine:

all of this, the light he wrote. But I won't let the shadow of the grave frighten away all the intricacies - macarons in Paris,

infection of the wisdom tooth, a friend reacquainted in the summer rain, love’s long blossom-into a brief bitter powder. Terrible night 

and all your vicious, brutal stars, 
give me strength to love the day.