orphans ovenbird When your father calls to report that your mother has gone to the hospital after a routine blood_test revealed unexpectedly large numbers of lymphocytes, I watch your face twist into a shape I rarely see. I make out the snake-like squirming of worry and fear and desperation and denial moving under_the_skin. I watch your brow furrow, I watch your eyes convey surprise and disbelief. More tests are being run but, for now, there are no_answers. You hang up the phone and your hands fall limp at your sides. “I’m not ready for this,” you say. You don’t have other words. “We are never ready,” I reply and hug you, but your arms are not strong enough to hug back, the muscles don’t have the will to lift the weight of your bones. We are never ready for time to cut us off at the roots. We are never ready to acknowledge the beginning_of_the_end. We are never ready to be next in line for death when the people just ahead have taken their turn and left us, stunned, standing at the turnstile. We are tied to the mill wheel of mortality and everything comes around no matter how hard we resist. If all goes according to plan our parents open a door to the world and help us walk into the light of consciousness, then, when we are grown, the door_to_eternity opens and we help them pass under the lintel into whatever comes after. We are set this task at birth, but we are never ready to carry it out. We will have to pick our way through midnight’s forest with nothing but the clothes on our backs and the industriousness of our own hearts. We make talismans of moss and feathers and force them to mean something. We re-enter the world orphaned and thin, looking to remember what home is. I imagine those of us similarly bereft finding each other in our twilight_years and recognizing that we have been cousins all along. There will be no authority left to make the rules so we will make our own, and live with a screeching abandon that comes from having nothing_left_to_lose. 250625 what's it to you? who go blather from