Renouncement

One day you’ll leave

(as is to be expected)

My hands will dismiss you

And clasp into silence their renouncement

Like blind earthworms

They’ll lose themselves in some pocket

Clumsy with defeat

desolate,

entangled.

You will return

(I hope)

I will have died a little

And we’ll pretend that nothing has changed.

“I’m proud of you”

I say into the void

And the poem (some 15 years before)

Cleverly captures it.

That this phrase may fix itself to your wings

adolescent superstition

fierce hymn whispered into half-darkness

at the threshold of this dawn.

Oh, one more thing:

Just in case it was not clear

to you, in the future,

“Please don’t go.”