"Five Years Later"

(To a Former Lover from a Married Woman)

What can I say to you,

who loved the unknown bits and

pieces of me into being

and watched the fragments weave themselves into another

whole with no more room

for a divided love?

The warp and woof of my

existence lie now

in my own hands,

steadier and wiser with the

passage of my inner time,

knowing more now of what I

chose than when I chose it.

Yes, I would choose again

the same end, but in a

different way, not out of

desperation and the need

to cling to clarity, but out of

freedom and the need to find

my own soul's fabric

The beginning?

I would not change

a single breathless moment

nor do I fail to savor

all the sharpened memories of it

this hot July night.

--Maril Crabtree