Poem: Reunion

Reunion

Life raft passengers
bound by time and space.
Early on they will
learn each other’s names.
They’ll make assumptions
they can never shake.
They’ll get to know each
other well enough,
but not so well as
each of them would hope.
They’ll go off to school,
graduate (or not),
and get new titles
like mom and doctor.
They’ll take old pictures
off of the wall and
put up new pictures
of younger people
that were taken on
vacations that were
much more convenient
than your childhood trips.
And now it has been,
what? Twenty-five years?
The kids all have kids,
no parents are left.
It is another
special occasion—
the calendar is
filled with them these days.
The people file in,
strange but familiar,
familiar here in
the literal sense.
Some of them are friends,
but all of them kin
through blood or marriage
they’re lumped together.
They didn’t all choose
to be together,
though some might do it
now given the choice.
No one picks their own
life raft; it’s just there.
You can accept it,
or you’re free to sink.
With those two options,
and only those two,
you might as well just
choose to stick around
and show up for more
special occasions
where everyone is
becoming with age
troublingly fat
or much too skinny.
(So few of us are
the right age and weight.)
The small talk is hard,
silence is more so.
Keep pushing and you
might just strike a vein.
Maybe in the end
it will be worthwhile.

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