Once in a lifetime,
you will look at a face
as familiar as your own,
one that witnessed your life,
one that softened with years
beside yours, and watched with
open-eyed wonder as your children
came into the world, wriggling, crying,
another miracle added to miraculous days.
But somehow joy that is life is also sorrow,
because the happiness in completeness
that mounted the mountaintops
knows a detachment, a falling
in equal measure to the rise.
But the fall is bittersweet,
the loss reminds gently of
the gift of ecstasy
found in love.

photo take by Lisa Paul during a trip to Lake Tahoe with her husband, Bill.

Copyright ©2026 Lisa Paul. All rights reserved.

Your challenge:

Re-read and explore Chan’s poem,  particularly the use of line breaks and caesura to build rhythm and evoke emotion, and the three-word movement: “anger is like the sun, which is like love”.

Now write a poem in the first person that begins with “Once in a lifetime”.

Think of a similar three-word movement (anger/sun/love) and develop it in your poem. It can be about a real situation in your past or current life, or something that happened to someone you know, or an imagined situation.

Poetics: Once in a Lifetime