Twenty Years In

Day 29: "In “After Turning the Clocks Back,” Jennifer Moxley links present with past, using a few well-placed details to invoke both a sense of the daily “now” and a nostalgic sense of the speaker’s long-ago life. In your poem today, similarly compare your everyday present life with your past self, using specific details to conjure aspects of your past and present in the reader’s mind."

Only one more day to go! This is a great prompt, despite feeling daunted by Moxley's masterful poem. What to write about? I've vowed to stop banging on about mobility issues, so perhaps I'll revisit the differences between my two marriages, twenty years in. 


Twenty Years In

Hot coffee and unhurried time 
Spent talking through our lives
Are your gifts to me those mornings
You're not off to chase the glory
Of the biggest catch. 

I remember a time
Of early nights and early mornings
A refuge from all-night, bare-all sessions,
Where we picked over what was going wrong,
Tried to paper over cracks with tissue paper.

Both times it started strong,
Bared souls between hot sheets,
Creating our world with our words.
That time we argued about semantics;
This time we sing the same song. 


© Copyright 2026. Chris Auger. All Rights Reserved.

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