We talked over dinner, after dinner,
once left alone, outside, and you said
you would like to stop judging me,
you would like to let me be the person I am,
you’d like to let me be “who you will be,” your words,
that you’d like to judge yourself less, too.
Start there, I said. Judge yourself less
— something new I’ve been learning, at my age,
from people who’ve been generous to me
by not holding who I am against me
while they ask questions about me and listen.
I shared with you what they’ve modeled for me
in an imperative phrase you heard me say
back to you. We haven’t heard,
lately, what each has said to the other.
not a lot of anything has been said to each other,
lately. It wasn’t hard to speak the phrase
start there. Such an easy pair of syllables,
two notes — direct, unpremeditated —
that seemed impossible, weren’t even thought,
which is what impossible at its best is:
what isn’t even thought, what’s never been conceived.
Then there it is, before you, a new path
you didn’t know you needed to take
yet were somehow always on,
didn’t know, couldn’t have known,
wouldn’t have believed it
had you been told just how lost
you were, how ready to be found.
This poem, with more by the author, appears in Issue 26 of The Mockingbird print magazine.
