All right, how about one more?
Yay!
OK.
Two more.
Two more?
OK, two more.
All right, I'll read two more.
I wrote this.
It was an honor.
I was able to go to DC a couple of weeks
ago for the interment ceremony for Matthew Shepard's remains
at the Washington National Cathedral, which
was one of the most moving experiences of my life.
And I was thinking about his parents
and about my own children.
And I wrote this in the hotel room.
So I have never read this out loud, but here it is.
The title is my daughter's birthday, "December 18, 2008."
"For just a fraction of a moment that afternoon,
if we think of time as being a whole,
you were the newest person in the world.
You were the emptiest vessel on Earth,
knowing nothing of this place or of yourself,
that you even were a self, that a self was something one could
be, that one could be at all.
And what was being?
For that narrowest sliver of a hole,
you were the least experienced person on Earth.
And then you weren't.
You knew me before you knew your own body.
What to do with your hands, your pink fists battering your face.
We swaddled you as if against that confusion.
Though, I tell you, that confusion never leaves.
The body remains a house unaware of its rooms."