Five Breaths
by Jane Yolen

How to measure a life?
Not by the time from birth,
when you must have come
squalling into the light.
But by the quiet hush
after you were gone.

Five breaths as I held your hand.
Five breaths shuddering,
as if the three-storied house
and all that is stuffed in it
was shaken by the wind
of your dying.

Five breaths, and all that time
I was alive when you were alive.
In the hush after,
though I kept on breathing,
I could not call that life.

Now all the days, the months,
the daft moments, the birdsong,
the naming of trees,
the grandson's small fist in your face,
the walks on Scottish Munroes,
count as nothing.

Five breaths.
In the end
that was all I had of you
before you took them away
and left me with only my own.