My wife and I celebrate our wedding anniversary next week, making fifty-eight in all, of which over the years I have managed to remember fifty-seven. Which is surely a pretty impressive record, though you wouldn’t think so to hear some people go on about it. So, this week I offer one of my own poems on the subject of long-married love, which I wrote a while back, but which I am glad to say is still just as applicable.

Acceptance

We stop at the garden centre for tea and cake,
Our time our own now, all the children gone,
And you talk to another couple at the next table
While I half-drowse in late October sun,
Answering your smiles on cue, but thinking
This is not me, not yet, or not today:
I am not ready for the small contentments,
Though what I want instead is hard to say.

Our forty years again, of toil and trial?
Indeed, if strength came with them to endure
All that love asks, the given and the taken,
But we have come where only loss is sure,
So I must learn new lines, an awkward actor
Who thought to have no part in age’s play.
Rehearse me, then, in love’s last role, acceptance.
Above all, till the final curtain, stay.

David Sutton