A Patchwork Quilt Poem by David Levitas

If our lives, seperate and conjoined are a patchwork,
Strung together with the stitches of sympathy, pain and steady resolution;
Laced together with the threads of a soul's threnody,
Tied with thoughts that belie suspicion,
The feeling attachment of what makes it twain,
Sometimes bursting the seam through eager carelessness,
Marking it with coffee rings or the stains of hot ash and dog ends;
Is to make a double quilt, an act of monumental solicitude,
A grafting of odd inconsistencies, of seperate parallel lives
That have grown different, though together, in shape, size, hue and colour;
But now sleep as one, enclosing the duvet, with that they have made,
The sheets that are tried, and so falteringly cover.