The Nearing of the Baton

All my life,
you were the hand just behind the torch,
the quiet twin,
the moon to my sunlit signatures,
keeper of watches,
carrier of weights,
the palm that caught the things fate dropped without warning.

Yet even gods have shadows.
Hermes runs beside us still,
winged ankles whispering that no messenger outruns time.

The baton…

This small, shimmering oracle,
drifts closer to your grasp with each mile the years unspool.

We have crossed many thresholds:
childhood’s chalk-dusted doorways,
where you shielded my test answers from hungry side-eyes;
young adulthood’s braids of paths,
like rivers braided by a distracted Poseidon;
and midlife’s labyrinth,
where even Theseus would envy the thin thread we followed out.

Now the air thickens with the perfume of crossroads.
The baton wavers between us like a comet choosing its orbit,
its silver length humming with the weight of unspoken hours.

Lean forward, my quieter twin.
The world tilts toward your waiting hand.
Even shadows know when to change riders,
even the lesser star in a constellation glows fiercely
when the horizon grows dark enough to finally honor it.

Ahead…

Our silhouettes begin to fuse,
two long figures cast by a setting era.
But something wondrous happens:
new, impossible light erupts around us,
the way dawn outlines mountains

before the sun admits it is returning.

A rim of radiance gathers at the edges of our twin shadows,
as if unseen torches were lifted in some secret ceremony.

In that luminous fringe,
the baton meets your palm,
not with burden,
but with the quiet thunder of a story finding its next voice.

And together,
outlined by a light with no earthly source,
we step into the new existence where two shadows
finally converge into one unbroken glow of oneness.