Love’s Full Circle
Forlorn on a Manhattan street corner
We stared at each other, then down the avenue.
Seaching the urban scape for answers.
The lovely song from A Chorus Line,
Still echoing from a just-shuttered matinee,
Was a cruel and haunting mockery.
What had I done for love?
What had we done to love
To abuse it, and shatter it until
It was no longer seeable, knowable,
At least not to us as we stood there mutely?
The song mocked me through the passing years,
As we parted and went separate ways.
We passed and circled, distance deliberately between us,
As other possibilities bloomed and never lasted.
Then the love we’d once known miraculously retuned.
Joy accompanied it and the old song went mute.
One day a granddaughter sang it again,
Her clear true voice bearing weighted messages
Of which she was blissfully unaware.
Memories flooded back, bad moments, real again,
But the golden notes shaped them into something new.
It had never been about what we did for love
But, instead, what love could do for us.
Only with time had we learned what we’d been given
And and how to live in that gift's full abundance.
I heard the song with a different ear
As it wrapped and tied up the old mockery
In a bright bow and disposed of it forever.
Charles B. Neff
12/5/2010
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