We need to be respectful
of tender psyches, mental illness,
all the agonies of existence.
We need to be respectful
of our own tenderness
and pained existence.
When being gentle of their tender troubles,
makes aches worse for ourselves,
who needs to respect whom?
Draw battle lines,
or at least find a bastion
against cries
calling you to your destruction,
dragging you to drown in the moat of their fragility.
Be respectful of your own precious sanity.
It couldn’t be, he said, that you are unwilling?
A shrug was the reply.
Do you feel unable?
Another shrug.
You know, he said, it’s always a choice;
if you are willing,
eventually,
you are able.
Grade eight.
Horror.
Mother is her substitute teacher today.
“Do not
acknowledge
that you know me!” she hissed.
But when her name was called for
attendance, and teacher-mother
looked around for
whichever student would raise her hand,
she glowered,
unhappy
with anonymity.
You’re going and now I think
of all the things that could have been
and all the things that should have been
and all the things that would have been
if only you’d been forthcoming
before you left.
Two identical
blazing logs
are ramming together
shooting sparks
with every shot,
neither aware
that they will set the
whole forest on fire
if they do not
stop ramming
and begin rolling
toward the cool waters
of understanding.
Like a stone on the beach
she picked him up,
and took him home.
He filled her with new life,
and they held companionable
hands, two became four.
Beneath the bubble,
Poisons devoured him in relentless nibbles,
and the doctor said his only hope
was a healing journey
to a new way of life.
But toward,
is also away,
and children waved good-bye
to their skipping stone,
who crossed an ocean and
disappeared into time.
I grew up
a pampered princess
a late life arrival, long desired.
I felt my father’s
fondness every day-
a travelling salesman
who never missed a moment
of my active life.
But you
lost your father
along the way, lost sight
of him over the barriers
your mother built between you.
What was it like to find him
as he was dying, knowing
he had never stopped
loving you, though you
were equally lost to him?
Once you found him,
he slipped into eternity.
As I watch you, so
polished at your work,
on this career high,
I wonder,
Are you still a lost boy?
Or did the chance to embrace him
at the end of his life,
to know how proud he was of you,
help ease the sorrow
as you set him free to fly?
I forgive you
for not meeting me for tea
And I wonder,
what kind of father
will you let yourself be?
.
.
(For S&D)
Today
is one day closer to
The Day
when he goes away.
Flashbacks this morning
to junior high,
“Get up! Your dad is ready!”
“But Mommmmmm!”
You’re too old for this, my boy.
The day is coming,
when you move south
to live your next adventure.
Get up and face today
because you’re here so briefly
and today is unfolding
My daughter was born on Good Friday, and Easter Sunday found me in the hospital chapel. The pastor was speaking about change. I sat in the back and bawled. I didn’t know exactly why I was crying, but I was overwhelmed with post-partum hormones and the realization that my life would never be the same. This conversation between characters Claire and Jenny reminded me of that time in my life.
“I’ve thought that perhaps that’s why women are so often sad, once the child’s born,” she said meditatively, as though thinking aloud. “Ye think of them while ye talk and you have a knowledge of them as they are inside ye, the way you think they are. And then they’re born, and they’re different—not the way ye thought of them inside at all. And ye love them, o’ course, and get to know them the way they are.. but still, there’s the thought of the child ye once talked to in your heart, and that child is gone. So I think it’s the grievin’ for the child unborn that ye feel, even as ye hold the born one in your arms.” She dipped her bead and kissed her daughter’s downy skull.
“Yes,” I said. “Before…it’s all possibility. It might be a son, or a daughter. A plain child, a bonny one. And then it’s born, and all the things it might have been are gone, because now it is.”
…”And a daughter is born, and the son that she might have been is dead,” she said quietly. “And the bonny lad at your breast has killed the wee lassie ye thought ye carried. And ye weep for what you didn’t know, that’s gone for good, until you know the child you have, and then at last it’s as thought they could never have been other than they are , and ye feel naught but joy in them. But ‘til then, ye weep easy.”
(Diana Gabaldon in Dragonfly in Amber p. 549)
On a non-stop eight hour drive,
we paused for fuel.
“What?” you asked
As you intercepted smirks
passed over your head,
when you climbed into the back seat
after the gas station bathroom break.
“Nothing,” we said, as we pulled
back onto the highway.
Even though your sister had been
traumatized when I left her
standing in the driveway as we tore off to the bus stop
that time,
while you waved at her from the back seat
and waited for me to notice,
this time
when your dad slammed the car door,
buckled up,
and drove away,
destination in his mind,
she was the one who said,
“Missing anyone?”
so when you climbed into the car,
you never even knew
you’d ever been left behind.
Shawn L. Bird 