-The poem reflects on aging as the quiet accumulation of loss, where love survives through memory and helps us keep moving forward.
Growing old is not a thunderclap.
It is quieter than that.
A chair left empty after dinner,
a name you almost call
before remembering the room
has learned to live without it.
One by one, they leave the table.
A mother’s hand.
A father’s cough.
A brother’s joke that still arrives
before the punchline does.
Friends who knew your foolish years,
your wild plans,
your first heartbreak,
your best lies,
your real face.
It is birthdays with fewer candles
than ghosts,
photographs becoming little churches
where the young still lean together,
laughing in shirts long out of fashion,
unaware of mercy,
unaware of time.
And still the world insists on morning.
Coffee brews.
Mail arrives.
Grass grows over everything
with its usual green indifference,
as if grief were just another season
to be managed by the sun.
But love does not die cleanly.
It leaves fingerprints.
It hides in recipes,
old songs,
the smell of rain on warm pavement,
the way you turn your head
at a voice in a crowd
that almost sounds like theirs.
You learn to carry the dead
not like stones,
but like lanterns.
Some days they are heavy.
Some days they glow.
And if you are lucky,
brutally lucky,
you grow old enough to understand
that loss is not the opposite of love.
It is love’s long echo,
answering from another room.
So you set the table anyway.
You pour the coffee.
You tell the stories.
You laugh where they would have laughed,
and for a moment,
against all evidence,
they are near.
Not as they were.
Not as you want.
But near enough
to keep walking.