The Birth of Light

Remember the evening we met, the bright autumn sun suspended in the sycamores as if it might not set, as if we might hold on to this day forever.

And perhaps we have. If forever is thirty years.

The word of the day is: juvenescent, and a friend forwards a relic of a photo: you, me somewhere in the jumble of our youth. Thirty Novembers later, those incandescent infant faces are so foreign to us, so lost, we can’t even puzzle together where we were or who we were, for the shock of what we’ve grown into.

Could we only have been together thirty Novembers? Only thirty Thanksgivings? We have celebrated more.

Could this catalog of feasts somehow explain how we arrived here, remind us of the origin of our exclusive cosmos?

***

Remember

By Joy Harjo

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

***

• What should we remember?