Before and After

I don't feel I can really write about what's going on in my life at the moment, and I am not much for writing poetry (at least not of the sort that gets shared), but I found myself up at 4am scribbling these words as I thought about regret and time and opportunity, and in the lack of anything else to say, I offer this jumble of sleepless thoughts.

There is the moment before,
and the moment after.
In between comes the moment of transition, as dying lies breathlessly moaning between the twin moments of dead and alive.
It is that middle waiting place; the moment whose long-anticipated passing makes the possible actual, whose flight leaves after behind, in its crashing, tumbling wake.
After having arrived, drenched and dripping with the waters of change, the mind and heart still clamor for what was. Before.
Disbelieving, yearning to plunge back under the surf and emerge where the waves have yet to pound the shore,
I flirt with the time before...
before the death
before the diagnosis
before the darkness
before the loss
before what is done cannot be undone
and after...
Now. This moment after when once again what is just is. No longer becoming, but become. When the after settles in for a nap on the rug, just there on his well-worn patch before the hearth, impervious to the frigid stone and the gray smoldering remains of my extinguished heart-fire.
There, in the bone-cold and bitter silence, it is hard to remember that after is itself simply the before to another moment...
Before whatever is next.
before the birth
before the cure
before the daybreak
before the gain
before what is yet undone is done.
After is where what is becomes what could be.
The place where the heart aches as it thaws from its arctic freeze,
its nascent smoldering flame exploding into beats of life.
The place where ashes give birth to the blazing Phoenix, and the light of hope bursts anew on the world of before.