Day 5 arrived yesterday about the same time that I upped my running (albeit at a very slow pace) to an hour of running.  There’s my excuse and I’m keeping with it.  It’s hard to write a new poem when you fall  asleep in your chair.  Yes, I know.  It’s a lame excuse.  But, given that when I got ill, it was exercise enough just remembering how to breath.  Then it was the challenge of being able to stand.  This became the challenge of walking, slowly and painfully again.  And just as I started to get it together for learning how to walk at a brisk pace, I began bleeding internally in my feet and lower legs.

Now and for some time now, they’ve told me that I am in remission.  Up until the last month or so every time I started to think I was getting this together and picking up speed, I would bleed again inside my feet.  Suddenly, a month ago, I started feeling much better.  I started with just a minute of running.  Now, I am up to very slowly jogging for an hour broken into increments.  My goal is that by the end of April, I hope to jog briskly for maybe 3 20 minute increments.  I realize this is not a fantastic feat.  But, slowly and surely, my dream is to get back to the point where I might teach my eldest daughter a think or two about distance running at a good and decent clip.  It’s very harsh that I was running 10-15 miles every other day until this thing hit me.  But, for the love of my daughters, I will recover at least this part of who I was.

All this blabbing and whining aside, the challenge today is to pick a poem in a foreign language and then pick the same sort of subject and create a poem in English.  I have a distinct disadvantage on this challenge.  I barely handle English well.  But, here we go.  The language picked?  Lithuanian.  Reason why?  Why not?  Besides, one of my aunts has Lithuanian in her heritage.  The topic?  Identity Crisis – the title reads….

To Be Me, Not You
by Michael Romani

Seems like I came into this life
     Unprepared for the coming strife
But certain that I would somehow find
     My way to my own peace of mind

From the first of it, it seemed sure
     That dis-ease needed some kind of cure
I found myself trying to find me in complexity
     And instead found my own simplicity

Reading line after line from the finest minds
        Peeling the meat of the fruit from the rinds
I found that search could go on forever and ever
        Being not that patient, this seemed not very clever

And I found that while it's important to see the light
       There is much to be said for the darkness of the night
And while I found that find my way to methods of mastery
        Brings delight; so does the acknowledgment of God's tapestry

I might have gone after the extremes of gold and earthly power
       But that seemed too much the withering hour
So, instead I turned my thoughts to the pursuit of true love
       Only to find it not here but in sacred heaven above

(c) April 5, 2018  Michael Romani
All Rights Reserved