A Poem to You on Your Birthday

They say that life is a journey,
A path cleared with dreams and ambitions
And recollected with memories and scars.

They say that everyone’s course is unique,
The most personal and lonely of treks into the unknown,
But we all are marked with the intersections
Where our voyages cross.

They say we are our experiences.
We embody the knowledge we have learned.
We take on some shape of the people we have loved.
We hold in the front of our minds,
The spot where they are the most easily reachable,
The things we have seen that we treasure.

Of all that I‘ve seen:
Flowering desert mountain cacti,
Stars falling across the Mississippi,
Or the sun setting smooth and quiet over the Gulf—
It is you, standing in the early evening light
Of late autumn, that I cherish the most.