It is hardly worth counting

the ways the world has nearly undone us,

survival is not an event but a condition. 

We wake, we endure, we look again. 

The sun rises,

laying its light across grief and tenderness

with the same indifference,

and somehow this becomes our instruction:

to live without the guarantee of meaning

and yet, insist upon it.

Life is not tragic because it wounds us,

that is simply its nature,

the tragedy lies in its refusal

to pause for our understanding.

We are asked to love knowing that everything

we love is moving toward disappearance. 

We are asked to build homes in time,

though time has never promised shelter. 

The truth we avoid is simple

and therefore unbearable:

nothing is coming to save us from finitude. 

But within this sentence lies the quiet miracle

that we are still capable of tenderness.

That we still reach for one another.

That we still speak, still write, still love,

not because it will last,

but because it is here.

-I.M