Yesterday my wife and I celebrated our diamond wedding anniversary (sixty years of marriage), so I thought I might mark the occasion with one of my own poems. This was in fact written around twenty years ago, but the sentiment seems if anything more applicable now than ever. Back then, of course, I was just at the age when one first begins to hear time’s wingèd chariot revving up behnd one in the distance; now I get the feeling that the damn thing is about to run me over any day soon. But what can I say: we’re both still hanging in there, for which much thanks.

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