Here I Am

 

Here I am, dying for poetry, when others live for it.

Here I am, living for poetry, when others die for it.

 

It didn’t begin with a baby that was never held,

a child, whose name was never called,

a son, who listened to a different drum,

and finally, neither a man, who scorned love at the end.

 

It really was a normal course of events,

a son when the old couple wanted a son, and

he knows, when to follow, and when to pause,

and listen to the meandering woods sing the course.

 

There was ample love in his crib,

crisp sounds in the morning from the street’s end.

It was all the machinery present in a game of chess,

when a lowly pawn gets promoted into a knight.

 

Hard bread that was crumbs others discarded,

unlikely places where a song can eek out of a rock.

He searched, how he searched for what was his,

and finally finds what is the lot of every man.

 

So, tonight he retires early, even though it is not the plan.

He knew that even as one travel daily half the remaining distance,

it still can be asymptotically too big a gap to span.

He rests his case; the defense offers no more pretense.

 

That was me, a man who found rest in the end.

When decidedly, he never had expected this breath of wind.

 

 

December 6, 2025

Koon Woon