What is gathered may help you reconcile
happy failures, sad triumphs, empty victories.
This egg is an amulet, small oval,
a capsule of what your life has come to.
Celebrate—raise high your frosty bottle.
and shout for more. The light is fading.
You must candle each day to see what lives.
Each fragile cell encases the code of your life.
Brood it in cupped hands. These memories have shaped you,
misshapen though you may be. Keep intact this shell.
Hold it close. What quivers on the brink of being
may yet save you—someone’s laughter. Someone
calling out your name. Someone’s touch. Recall
what remains. Remember what has lasted.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 6.
Mark DeFoe taught literature and writing at West Virginia Wesleyan College for 35 years. His work has been widely published in chapbooks, anthologies and textbooks, and in the journals Poetry, Paris Review, Reed, Denver Quarterly, Salmagundi, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Saltzberg, Black Warrior Review, Christian Science Monitor, and many others.
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