Passages

This is in response to my sister's wonderful post about our parents, siblings and extended family. This is the title poem of the poetry chapbook (by the same name) I had published a few years ago. As we get older, the family connections get more precious and more fragile. At some point, many of the more endearing are but tendrils of memory.

As we lose the pieces of our past,
Person by person,
As we cut the cords,
One by one,
Of our invulnerability,
We are left to wobble
Uncertainly
In the vast realization of our own mortality.