We Have Only This Moment, This Single Opportunity Poem by Dennis Ryan

Wednesday morning and afternoon, October 24,2012; Thursday, Nov.8,2012; Monday afternoon, December 17,2012

"Being the social and helpful creatures we are, language seems to be the perfect means to trade information... at little cost to the provider.As Braten says, ‘the very act of exchanging useful information is prosocial and may sometimes be altruistic in a reciprocal sense.' "
- Dennis Ryan, from the book review of Stein Braten's The Intersubjective Mirror in Infant Learning and Evolution of Speech

Perhaps there is some hope for us yet
if we can believe in something, someone.
We have only this moment, this single opportunity,
and some years back, I said,
we are true to ourselves
in only two instances:
in love and death.
If we are lucky,
we find someone to love,
and they love us back.
And I've been lucky.
Then we die,
and we don't love death,
and death doesn't love us.
No, death doesn't love us back,
nor money either.
Love and death—
they strip off our masks,
strip us naked
to live our lives authentically
if only for awhile.