Affirmation by Donald Hall

Like I said, I hate poetry. Well, I like Nikki Giovanni. And Lucille Clifton. And Maya Angelou in small doses. And my friend Kamilah Aisha Moon (go buy her book!).

 I just don't know a lot of poetry. And when my eyes start glaze over from all those verse or really obfuscatory words, well, I'm not going to know it.

But this poem, it made me feel some kinda way. It's by Donald Hall and it's called "Affirmation."

To grow old is to lose everything. 
Aging, everybody knows it. 
Even when we are young, 
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads 
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer 
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters 
into debris on the shore, 
and a friend from school drops 
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us 
past middle age, our wife will die 
at her strongest and most beautiful. 
New women come and go. All go. 
The pretty lover who announces 
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. 
Another friend of decades estranges himself 
in words that pollute thirty years. 
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge 
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

I like because I'm getting old. And, this past year, I lost just about everything, starting with my damn mind. I also started rowing, you know, crew, oars, boats, all that. So, the metaphor he uses trips my trigger (and if you've ever rowed on the Cuyahoga after a summer rainstorm, you know all about polluted waters and debris on the shore!). 

But it's the idea of things drifting away — relationships failing, family dying, friends turning — and realizing there's nothing to do but declare it "fitting and delicious."  Well, that just gave me LIFE, y'all.