Remember the day we died?

On that day, so cold and gray,

My heart was sick with grief;
The rain tap-tapped the needled firs
In gentle contrast to the sound of your leaving;
The soft patter soothed the edges of my pain
As a mother's hand on her feverish child's forehead;

I went for a walk, not angry, but afraid;
And, try as I might, I could not keep from falling in the mud;
I think I remember crying;

It must have been raining on Caesar, huddled under his cloak,
On the banks of the Rubicon, the drizzle softening his shape,
As his wheels turned, his gears grinded,
Weighing, calculating;
But Caesar had glory as his reward;
For us, only the hope that our next hell would be short-lived;

From the moment I heard your car in the driveway
To the turning of the knob, there passed a small eternity;
And from somewhere else I saw us, not quite facing each other,
As the fateful reality we had both been avoiding came into being;

I loved you because you were the mother of the family that we will never have;
And because you were so beautiful in the moonlight;
And it seems strange, after so long, to look back now,
But it is raining and cold and gray,
And, in the end, isn't it good that, like Caesar, we made the crossing?