Real

“When will you start your family?”
they’d ask him and me
as if two is too few to really be.
As if years of making a life,
of saving, spending, considering, planning, renting, buying,
surprising, laughing, crying
all the extraordinary ordinariness of what it means to be together
hadn’t earned us the right to call ourselves anything more than…what?

What was I to him
in the grocery store, the car dealership, the emergency room,
the veterinarian’s office, the church pew, the bank,
our first home,
our first bed?

What were we as we stood before God making covenant,
and in keeping it as the sun rose and set, rose and set, over and over for
these four years?

What would we be if a baby never blossomed in this belly?
Fifty years on:
Frauds?
Failures?
Friends?

“When will you start your family?”
What else have we been,
all this time,
him and me?