Luck

My mother told me once –
she was seventy perhaps –
how, in the night from time to time,
my father took her hand
and that, in those moments
she reflected that she had been lucky
in life for all the pain it cast.
I think of them, like that,
in their house by the silent river,
side by side, holding hands,
the world and its great troubles
in the dark all around them.