Your story is locked inside
You won’t talk, instead
you find a new subject:
clothes or garden.
‘What’s done is done,’
you say.
‘That was another day.’
History locked away
inside a vault,
leaving fathomless mysteries
names on birth certificates
and censuses.
Secrets saved as treasures,
Truth tucked tightly behind
closed doors
you won’t unlock.
Shawn L. Bird 
But if you do choose to unlock it, it will take one full year to unload all of the treasure.
Indeed!
Sometimes the past is more comfortable locked away, less hurtful. Sometimes it’s better shared. When you talk of the story locked inside, it’s not always a secret though, just hurts that are either best not shared or unable to be shared. Some men find things difficult to share and keep them close but they are not secrets, just unshared feelings. xxx Huge Hugs xxx
I notice that so often the stress of holding in the secret is not worth the secret itself. Like the saying, “Joy shared is joy doubled, pain shared in pain halved.”
Wow! This is amazing. I’ve been doing genealogy research on my mother’s side of the family and in 2009 discovered a long hidden family secret concerning my Grandmother Hattie Finney Banks. Found out the rest of the story this year via a Black Ancestry page on Facebook. It was a very sad story and I now see why my grandmother kept the details hidden and essentially lied to protect her three daughters, the eldest my Mom Mable Palmer, and her grandchildren. In those days domestic violence and murder were not things to be discussed and once Grandma Hattie moved away from West Virginia where the tragedy occurred she created a story to explain the absence of grandfather. Basically my grandfather, Hugh Banks (Hattie’s husband) shot and killed my Great Grandfather Daniel Finney (Hattie’s Dad) in a drunken rage. My grandmother with the help of her brother left West Virginia for Dayton, Ohio where my Mom and aunts were raised. My grandfather died at age 30 in prison from TB. He is buried in the Potters Field attached to the prison. But eventually what is hidden in the dark comes to the light. The eldest Aunt now in her 90s on my Mom’s side told me the truth as much as she knew Thanksgiving 2009 and thanks to me putting my Grandmother photo on FB for Mother’s Day, a white lady who still lives in Davy, WV and subscribes the African-American genealogy site saw the picture, thought we might be related and sent me all the information including newspaper articles and death certificates. God Works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.
Wow. What a find! How lucky you were.
This exposes the great wealth of information that dies with the secreter probably because of some shameful and erroneous value’s of those times. Heritage, even DNA, lost forever but it’s existence is articulately stated in your poem.
I have a highschool friend whose mother wouldn’t let her get a Social Insurance Number (ie no job, no drivers licence, etc). She didn’t know why, and her mom would just burst into tears and leave whenever she tried to ask. It required her birth certificate, which her mom wouldn’t give her. Eventually her dad took her aside and explained that he wasn’t her birth father, and that her mother was too embarrassed to talk about it. Between her dad and an aunt, she found out the whole story, but her mother still won’t talk of it. It made a lot of my friend’s confusing childhood memories come into place, and made her feel better, but her mother couldn’t face it. It never made sense to us.
wonderful
Glad you like it.