Homebuilder- A Poem

I watched you build a house

I thought

Perhaps it wasn’t lasting

As natural disasters happen

Almost all the time.

And given enough of that time, I thought

The house that had been built

Would go

It would vanish

You and I would blink

In time

And we would find

That there lay an empty plot of land

And that

And us

Was all that was left

And I would look at you and say

Let’s build something special

And you would answer,

Let’s plant one hundred trees

And in one hundred years

We’ll still be watching them sway.

But there never was a ground-clearing

Disaster

And we both knew far more about

Watching trees

And admiring their beauty

Than we ever did planting them

And in that time, that passing time,

I watched you build

A separate house on purchased land

And every year I saw levels added

In stone and concrete

And bits of old carved wood.

And after spending my life now

Waiting

Watching

On the lookout for the phoenix

And the flame

I found myself stood in a prairie

A plot

That small spot of nothing

And no seeds

Let alone trees

And I watched you step out

Onto the porch

In the night

Holding your life in a blanket and cloth

And I trailed my hands through

Towering grass and the truth

That I’d spent my waning time waiting

Alive but never seeing

That you were never building a house

You had already built a life.