To Forgive

We all carry emotional baggage--past mistakes, regrets unending, unwise choices, decisions that carry us to the easier or more difficult road to recovery. And the only way to untangle ourselves from this is to forgive. Forgive ourselves, forgive people, forgive the situation, forgive time, forgive the Universe. Pamela Spiro-Wagner has so strongly and beautifully expressed the true meaning of what it is to forgive...

To Forgive
by Pamela Spiro-Wagner
To Forgive Is...
To begin and there is so much to forgive:
for one, your parents,
one and two,
out of whose dim haphazard coupling
you sprang forth roaring,
indignantly alive.
For this, whatever else followed,
innocent and guilty,
forgive them.
If it is day,
forgive the sun its white radiance
blinding the eye;
forgive also the moon
for dragging the tides,
for her secrets,
her half heart of darkness;
whatever the season,
forgive it its various assaults--
floods, gales, storms of ice--
and forgive its changing;
for its vanishing act,
stealing what you love
and what you hate,
indifferent, forgive time;
and likewise forgive its fickle consort,
memory, which fades the photographs
of all you can't remember; forgive forgetting,
which is chaste and
kinder than you know;
forgive your age
and the age you were
when happiness was afire
in your blood and
joy sang hymns in the trees;
forgive, too, those trees,
which have died;
and forgive death for taking them,
inexorable as God,
then forgive God
His terrible grandeur,
His unspeakable Name;
forgive, too,
the poor devil
for a celestial fall
no worse than your own.
When you have forgiven
whatever is of earth, of sky,
of water, whatever is named,
whatever remains nameless,
forgive, finally,
your own sorry self,
clothed in temporary flesh
the breath and blood of you
already dying.
Dying, forgiven,
now you begin.