May, Meet December
I head the tsks, tsks
as I walked down the street.
Neither gender nor age is requisite
for the near hisses of shame.
Such moral outrage
not seen here since
the minister ran off
with the choirmaster’s beautiful wife.
That was clearly wrong
even though the minister’s
wife was a shrew
and the choirmaster abusive.
They deserved your wrath.
But I have not earned this grief.
When I introduced May to December,
all of you had nasty things to say
about me
and about them.
The idea that the introduction
was a perverted sense of humor stung.
Making me an accessory to
cradle-robbing rubbed salt into a new wound.
That I might share
an in early inheritance
was also a body blow.
Believe me I am not a villain
and blight on this fair community.
For together, May and December
can avoid some of life’s great dangers.
When May looks at December,
the gloomy future of aging is revealed;
no vision of great reward.
When December looks at May
all those memories of
the strife and frustration
of youth are etched in stone.
So May and December have to protect
each other from the ghosts of the past
and future phantoms.
The past and the future are
forever long
and life is all too short
to be bogged down in
those temporal Infernos.
May and December
have the great opportunity
to live in the lively present.
The present is all that belongs
to us to control.
Until we can draw curtain
on the past and future,
one way we can live in contentment
is be more like May and December.
Doug Minnis
February 7,2010