THE HAPPIEST DAY by jude kyrie

My happiest day
It was so long ago
I know it was spring the
Lilacs were pungent and everywhere
the air was drenched with their fragrance.
I did not know I was happy back then.
Each day more chores to do
not enough sleep.
Always working and never enough money.
The children came one after another.
the youngest newer than the springtime.

It was so long ago
when we sat on our porch
sipping hot coffee
a rare adult moment for us.
In the early quiet cool spring morning.
Our children still asleep in their beds.
On the table next to the coffee pot
a rolled newspaper full of war
and drama of the day, lay untouched.

I remember looking up 
at you at that moment.
Your beautiful hair
stirring in the slight morning breeze.
I saw you then not as my wife
or mother to my children,
but as a woman
the one I could never get enough of
when we first met.

I thought how good your hair would feel
falling onto my bare chest in our bed.
If only I could have frozen that moment in time
put it into a bottle like a captured insect.
To open and breathe its fragrance,
again and again through the passing years.
To last me forever in good and bad times.

If we could return to that moment
and you were to ask me then,
"My love are you happy?"

There in a distant time
on the old porch with lilac’s
cascading from its broken trellis
in glorious fragrant abundance.
Beside the floral pathways
of a far off spring

I would have answered
to you softly
in a loving whisper.
"yes my love.
Very happy,
so very happy