We Wait

It’s a tentative touch—a toddler stretch—to make connection to one whose cells are giving up one by one,

and we wait as toddlers touch.

It is the way of things, I guess, this living and dying.

She is young and vital, full of life and energy, synapses popping with all there is to learn and all there is to live.

And she has filled a bushel of years with doings, dreams, and days, and now they are ebbing out with gasps and prayers,

and the grasping to reedy breaths comes alongside a wish to just let go;

and here they connect in these days lined with tears,

new with the old,

small with the bruised,

both with love, and we wait as toddlers touch.