I have lived in this quiet
certainty:
‘custom makes all things easy’.
Constant rehearsal has given me
skills
to heal the tired spirits
of world-weary children, looking
bleakly
through the bars of their despair;
I know when to light candles in
blank dark, how to cool hate, honour love;
I take the softer ways, I
side-step pain,
measuring my happiness
in small things as horizons
disappear
and the foreground fills the view.
I am used to living now,
practising
each hour, over and over.
But dying will be difficult and
strange.
(February,
1990)
