This poem would not let me write it.
For years it kept me looking elsewhere,
Kept me at bay with other, more seductive subjects.
Hiding in a corner of my mind in its invisible cocoon,
Slowly growing, transforming itself, evolving,
Until one day it announced its presence like Hamlet’s ghost,
Asking me to remember what I thought I never knew.
There is a secret that no soul will willingly share,
A hurt so deep we bury it alive and pretend it never lived.
What was it that crept out to pull me back, erasing the years—
A picture, a random thought, a boy shedding tears?
The poem now commands me, insisting on its need to be,
Refusing the excuses, rejecting my self-justifying fears--
That after all I will not be able to write the words,
Too weak or too afraid to make the thoughts a living thing.
The heart aches to find a way, to manage the voice,
To shape the words and sounds so they come out true.
Da, I wish you’d have let me know who you were,
I wish you’d have allowed me inside your life,
Your mind, at the end, was a sealed vault, locked,
And I would never, never know what you loved or
Why you lived your life, and what you thought of me.
We went fishing twice, together but somehow irrevocably alone,
After that, there were visits, the Christmas dinner, the tv.
What became of you and me? Just before you died,
Lost in the fog of a morphine drip and numb to the pain of life,
You placed your hand on my head—and that was all.
It was enough, I think, to let me know what I needed to do.