May, Meet December
I hear the tsks, tsks
as I walk 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 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 one 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 December can protect May
from nightmarish dreams
of future disasters.
May can then protect December from
reliving all the past errors.
The past and the future are
forever long
and life is all too short.
May and December
have a great opportunity
to avoid that sad bog
by living just in the present.
The present is all that belongs
to us
and it is what we can control.
Until we can draw curtain
on the past and future,
one way we can live in the moment
is be more like May and December.
Doug Minnis
February 7,2010