Parents

They see more of us than we’ll ever see of them,
They hear more from us than we’ll ever hear from them,
They know more about us than we’ll ever know about them.

They saw the moments which shaped us,
They witnessed our history in the making,
At times they presaged the moments that will break us.

They presided over our youthful vulnerability,
We will be attendant to their ageing physiology.
Their final image of us will be the summit before the fall,
Our penultimate image of them will be the plateau before death.

And we will wish that we had known more about their lives once lived,
How they came to be, how they chanced upon love,
And how they held us, saw us and chose, in spite of our flaws, to love us.