Jase the Old and Tali the Young – Christmas, 2025
When I was born, I stood against the wind,
A little king of untested land and bone,
And thought the world must yield itself to me,
As though the sky were something I could own.
I set my will like iron in the earth
And would not bend for rain nor winter’s breath …
For what was youth, if not a bright defiance,
A laughing ignorance of time and death?
The rivers spoke, but I would not yet hear;
The grasses bowed, but I would not yet see
How every living thing that learns to kneel
Outlives the proud, unyielding tree of oak.
I called it strength to stand and never sway,
To meet each storm with jaw and spirit set …
Not knowing then the oldest song of earth
Is whispered low, and never shouted yet.
Then came the years that temper and divide …
The forging years, when love and labour meet,
When hands grow calloused, not from holding tight
But learning when to open up and to retreat.
I loved, I lost, I built, I broke again,
And each undoing taught me something strange:
That what survives is not the stubborn stone,
But that which lives in motion and in change.
And in my middle days, I came to know
A quieter strength than youth had ever guessed:
The strength to yield without a sense of shame,
The strength to bow the head and call it blessed.
For I had seen the oak split in life’s gale,
While slender reeds bent low and rose once more,
As if the wind itself had passed them by
And found no purchase there to wage a war.
Then age drew near with unannounced soft steps,
And laid its silver fingers in my hair,
And where I’d once have raged against its hand,
I found a curious and willing care.
For what is age, if not a deepening stream
That winds more slowly, yet with greater grace?
Not loss of fire, but fire made more knowing,
A gentler light upon a weathered face.
I watched the young men standing as I stood …
All iron-willed and certain of their way …
And saw within their bright, defiant gaze
The same blind courage I had known one day.
And oh, I wished to tell them what I learned,
But wisdom walks too softly to be heard
By those whose blood is loud with its own drum …
The lesson waits, like an unspoken word.
Now I am old, and yet I am not old,
For I have put away that rigid crown;
I do not stand against the turning world …
I turn with it, and so am not cast down.
The wind may come, and I will go with it,
Not out of weakness, but a deeper art:
To bend, to bow, to yield … and in the yielding,
To keep unbroken both the form and heart.
For mark me well … what stiffens, perishes;
’Tis rigidity that lays the spirit low.
But they who bend, like reeds before the storm,
Shall never learn the heaviness of snow.
Be supple, child … and though the years may pass,
No age shall find you, nor the grave confine:
For they who yield to life in every breath
Step past its ending … into the divine.
