My friend has a son. So do I. My friend bares the knowledge, thought, reality and image that is his son, like a wound. His wound causes him to walk with a limp – that kind of wound. The king of wounds. No bleeding – just the crying throb of loving someone outside your control but within your responsibility. My son is younger than my friend’s son. I think that makes my wound smaller or more accurately: just as large but not as acute. As if I’m a teenage soldier, back from the front with a slice of shrapnel in my back that the doctor couldn’t get to and youth covers up the pain, the limp, the welling tear with that combination of hope, virility and stupidity that is rightly youth’s province. I know my limp will come – I already feel a twinge now and again, like the man who gets a reminder of a long past surgical procedure on a cold day. I walk, I run but there’s knowledge of a slower pace in my stride, somehow. So much has been written on the death of the son of God. I shudder at the pain of a God whose son’s been killed. I don’t know why my friend loves me but he does. I see our many differences – great canyons of ‘difference’ in fact. My friend is protective of words and their meaning – he would have made a good legal draughtsman. (Then again, considering the nature of contemporary legislation, maybe not). But he doesn’t ‘get’ poetry, or so he says. He hangs on words of hope and so do I – maybe this is where we find our communion. I have heard couples who have chosen to remain childless talk about not bringing children into such a horrible world as this – saying in fact that they didn’t wish to unleash the world upon a child. But I smile in wonder and anticipation at the thought of unleashing my child upon the world.
Cambo/Emu 6.6.04/7.21/9.21
© The Grumpy Old Dilettante, 2021