Fourteen...
Fourteen years have passed today,
Since I had to let you go away,
Fourteen years since I held you tight,
And watched a piece of me leave that night.
I wrote your goodbye in words back then,
Perhaps to make some sense of when,
A life so new could end so soon,
Before it had seen a morning noon.
You were my first, my little son,
And in two days, your race was run,
No time to crawl, no time to speak,
No time to grow, no time to seek.
I never heard you call me Dad,
Never knew the boy I might have had,
Never saw your smile, your stubborn ways,
Never counted your birthdays.
And that is what the years have done,
They've shown me what was never begun,
Not just the child I had to lose,
But every life you could choose.
I sometimes wonder, at fourteen,
What kind of boy you might have been,
Would you be taller than me by now?
Would you still be making me wonder how?
Would we have fought, as fathers do,
Would I have been too hard on you?
Would you have thought I talked too much,
And slowly learned to dodge my touch?
Then, three years later, another son,
Came into our lives, another sun,
And holding him, I understood,
That life could still be something good.
I watched him take his first small stride,
And felt your absence by my side,
For every milestone that he knew,
Was one more milestone missed by you.
But never did I love him less,
For being born from your emptiness,
And never did he take your place,
He simply brought his own embrace.
Perhaps that's what the years have shown,
That love can grow around a stone,
That grief can sit beside the sun,
And both can stay when day is done.
Time's a great healer, they say,
And that's the great debt we all pay,
Fourteen years have proved them right,
I learnt to live, I learnt to fight.
But healing never meant you're gone,
It only taught me to carry on,
To carry what I cannot mend,
To miss a beginning without an end.
I wrote back then, I'd await my day,
To follow you when life gave way,
I did not know what life would bring,
Or what another child could sing.
Your brother came, and life moved on,
And somehow darkness met the dawn,
I learnt that living wasn't betrayal,
Nor was happiness some kind of denial.
So I don't write goodbye today,
I've said those words and had my say,
Fourteen years have changed that part,
You don't leave a father's heart.
You remain my firstborn son,
The first small race that I had run,
The first great love I could not keep,
The little boy who visits me in sleep.
I do not know where you may be,
Or if somewhere you remember me,
But if there is a place beyond this view,
I hope you know I remember you.
Not every day, not every hour,
Life has its noise, its work, its power,
But every year, when this date comes,
The noise grows still, the silence hums.
And for a while, I am back there,
A younger man, with you to care,
A father who had barely begun,
When he was asked to bury his son.
Fourteen years! And still I find,
There are some things time leaves behind,
You were here, that much is true,
You are me, and I am you.
