Now forty-five years on, this day we’d celebrate,
the one we measure starting to conjoin our lives,
became the day I count as when my old self died,
and Juliet the mold from which my life would come.
We danced together, bodies matching like a rhyme,
then sat and talked, and each word stuck in memory.

We count that date as our first date, a memory
to bring us joy, and every May we celebrate
the twentieth. But two months on, July will rhyme
in time, the day I held my nerve and changed our lives,
confessed my love from that day on and all to come:
And if she is no longer close, it has not died.

It took us just three years until we singly died,
as wedded we became as one, a memory
that was well photographed. My Juliet has come,
her parents beaming at us both, to celebrate
the hope their love will find a mirror in our lives,
that I shall be her rhythm, and she will be my rhyme.

Within three months her body tried to break her rhyme
as pain and illness crowded in. One dream that died,
a surgical career, did not disturb our lives.
A family doctor was replete, each memory
of patients she had helped suffice to celebrate,
a source of satisfaction lasting years to come.

How could we know how quick both joy and pain would come?
For Jessica arrived, to make a triplet rhyme
and every day we shared was cause to celebrate
until at seven years, near Mothers’ Day she died.
No parent should be forced to have a memory
to fill their daughter’s lonely place within their lives

A son was shortly born, a blessing in our lives
the last, with three more girls miscarried still to come.
We’d nurture happiness in each new memory
and even in a minor chord, our spirits rhyme.
No happy ending here. Her heart stopped and she died.
Is there a way that I can find to celebrate?

The song our lives entwined is now a broken rhyme.
The ambulance has come, and Juliet has died,
but in her memory, I choose to celebrate.
 

                                   27 May 2024