another year has returned us…

1988 “III” from Wendell Berry

Another year has returned us
to the day of our marriage
thirty-one years ago. Many times
we have known, and again forgot
in our cruel separateness,
that making touch that feelingly
persuades us what we are:
one another's and many others',
brought together as by a music
of singing birds hidden among
the leaves, or the memory of
small flowers in the dark grass.
How strange to think of children
yet to come, into whose making we
will be made, who will not know us
even so little as we know
ourselves, who have already gone
so far beyond our own recall.

(for “I”, from 1988, see here; and for “II”, from 1988, see here)