Fifty Years Is Really Not Enough
By Nicholas Gordon

Fifty years is really not enough
In which to plumb the depths of someone's soul.
Fifty more years, then, should be the goal:
To know the beauty of another's love,
Yearnings shape, and life-long shadows buff.

Yet life was never easy in those years.
Everest is sometimes hard to climb.
A will to love has brought you to this time,
Rich in joys that time cannot remove.
So may this day be filled with happy tears!

How Do I Love Thee?
By Elizabeth Barret Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Happiness has been your gift to me
All these years of melody and pain,
Pleasure, hardship, wanton rhapsody,
Pure delight and hard, wind-driven rain.
Years do not add up to love and glory:
All things rest on non-things far more true.
No note is so sustained throughout our story;
Nothing but your love, and mine for you.
In our lives must always be confusion:
Very little lost in Time is clear.
Even so, the whirlwind's an illusion
Regarding the few things we hold most dear.
So you have chosen me, and in that choice
Alone I find my refuge and my voice.
Reality is made by our own will:
You made my world and hold me in it still.

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