Don’t—!
Don’t speak a word
Outside the rounds
We usually fall through

Don’t let yourself
Realize
The hours have grown few—

Put your steps
In time with mine,
Let’s wonder at the stars

And talk of life and love and risk
And things that are not ours

And overlook that day by day
Time has taken the hours away

For as they left, they left behind
A space that friendship filled

Memories that folded themselves
From the paper we tread upon

And wrote in tiny, scrawled hand script
Letters only we can read

That rise from the pages of our maps
When we wander back that way

And give the places two-fold depth
When we retrace our steps

A new world before our eyes—
An old one in our living breath

For the things we did together
Creased the maps we carried on

And directed the tumble of our lives
As we stumbled forward on

Turning us round certain corners
By instinct innumerably built

From things we did and said
When we were young and still

Hand in hand beneath the trees,
Beneath those chilly stars

Thinking only of the songs we loved
And the dreams they’d begun.

It’s this same old nonsense
I want to remember as our last—
No talk of change and parting
And commemorating things gone past

For that would steal away the chance
To have five minutes more
Of us together in this falling world
Just as we were before.

So blink away the facts of time,
Ignore its heavy power,
Steal back from it the moments few
To be we and us and ours.

They belong to you and me,
And time cannot have them.