FOR A NEW MATRIARCH
for Joanne DelBene, June 2000
Sustaining elders everywhere
Look to you.
Maintaining elders everywhere
Count on you.
Trust the maintaining elders,
For they will learn trust from you.
They will learn that even you
Lean not on your own understanding.
Be their compass in life’s woods,
Pointing out a long-developed True North.
They will learn from you
That the straight path winds through hills of doubt
And is made straight only by your convictions,
In your decisiveness,
In your choosing to bask on those tempting hills
Only for as long as it takes to rest,
Soak up experience,
And move on.
They will come to understand
That you were rarely certain where your path led,
But you followed it anyway,
Rejoicing in life’s individual moments,
Hoping and trusting in the surer hills on the horizon.
They will know all this
Because you were a beacon,
Always a little further down the path than they.
In the end, you must trust like never before.
There are many things you will never see.
Our human fate is always
To leave the play before the curtain falls
And to trust in the happy ending.