My name is Padraig Otuma, and for as long as I can remember, I have remembered anniversaries.

I write them on my calendar now, anniversaries of somebody's death or a move or something big.

I find it meaningful when somebody texts me to say, I've remembered that today's a big day or an anniversary of it,

so I try to do the same for others.

It's a marker of time, I suppose,

and it's a way in realizing that it's not just Thursday,

it's also five years or one year or ten years since something happened.

It can go backwards as well as forwards, of course, you know,

because sometimes you can be thinking it's Thursday for everybody else,

but for me, it's one week until the big thing happens.

Time happens out of nowhere, and often we can't anticipate it,

and one of the things we can do is to market.

For the anniversary of my death by W.S. Merwin.

Every year, without knowing it, I have passed the day when the last fires will wave to me,

and the silence will set out, tireless traveller, like the beam of a lightless star. Then I will no longer find myself in life, as in a strange garment, surprised at the

earth and the love of one woman and the shamelessness of men.

As today, writing after three days of rain,

hearing the rain sing and the falling cease and bowing,

not knowing to what.

Music not knowing to what.... I'd never thought about the day that I'll die until I read this poem.

Maybe some people have.

But obviously for most of us, we don't know the date.

...