In the Meantime by Tom Hirons

In the Meantime
by Tom Hirons

Meanwhile, flowers still bloom.
The moon rises, and the sun.
Babies smile and somewhere,
Against all the odds,
Two people are falling in love.

Strangers share cigarettes and jokes.
Light plays on the surface of water.
Grace occurs on unlikely streets
And we hold each other fast
Against entropy, the fires and the flood.

Life leans towards living
And, while death claims all things at the end, 
There were such precious times between, 
In which everything was radiant 
And we loved, again, this world.

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We hold each other fast against entropy — this is what we do, accompanied by those we cherish. I love this sense that this is what we do, against the backdrop of a chaotic world. Esther Perel talked about those who chose to live vs. those who choose not to die, and I’ve thought much on how the way life unfolds is so fundamentally different sourced from those two orientations, and how either come as much from security as trauma, and that we can be malleable between them but to the degree I have any conscious choice, I would have the former.

Tom Hirons is a contemporary British writer, poet, and storyteller based in Devon, England, author of Sometimes a Wild God (Hedgespoken Press, 2015) and other works circulated through Hedgespoken Press