in celebration of surviving

This past saturday offered a chance to get a baby sitter for the kids, grab a bottle of wine, and join good friends for a birthday party for 6. Our dear friend was a January baby - so we gathered to celebrate her... and catch up on their trip to DC for Obama's swearing in - and stories about our respective 10 year marriages - and how for some of us the first 5 years were harder, for others, the second 5 years were harder... and for some - all 10 have been hard. But we celebrated surviving - honoring our friends and the birthday girl - with dinner and this poem...

"In Celebration of Surviving," by Chuck Miller

when senselessness has pounded you around on the ropes
and you're getting too old to hold out for the future
no work and running out of money,
and then you make a try after something that you know you
won't get
and this long shot comes through on the stretch
in a photo finish of your heart's trepidation
then for a while
even when the chill factor of these prairie winters puts it at
fifty below
you're warm and have that old feeling
of being a comer, though belated
in the crazy game of life
standing in the winter night
emptying the garbage and looking at the stars
you realize that although the odds are fantastically against you
when that single January shooting star
flung its wad in the maw of night
it was yours
and though the years are edged with crime and squalor
that second wind, or twenty-third
is coming strong
and for a time
perhaps a very short time
one lives as though in a golden envelope of light