In your attempts to be my father, you took away my mother.

When I look at the vast expanse of willows swaying in the wind
humming a fading lullaby to me
absorbing the years I have lived

I feel the earth around me, dampening the ache in my chest.
It is so beautiful I could cry. A sea of green life
carrying the weight of all my self loathing, your words, memories of the sweet sting in my chest and
an inability to craft the words that would make you stop.

Quietly stripped of excuses, the anger blows away like cotton
until there is nothing left to face but my own desolation.
I am peeled open and pouring out

Maybe this is why you cry at thousand year old Catholic cathedrals
the yellow and gray carved stone, patriarchal monuments
to destroying the natural way a thing is and rebuilding it
in the image of a god that replaced the father you never had
as if the world were only beautiful if it were man-made
as if what you were given wasn’t enough

In the wetlands I try to wear your mask and
picture a vast city of renaissance architecture
and cobblestone streets,
marvel at the echoes of an older world.
I imagine what it would be like to to have
such an ignorance to everything here that I could tear it apart
and create something that attempts the intricacies
of a system far older and wiser.

But I see peace and patience and release and god in juniper waves
in the diving swallows that frighten you I see joy and freedom
I cannot understand, I will not understand
how I am meant to be more important
than all of this

Lying in a pool of grass, I breathe out your expectations like smoke
refill my lungs in the cool breeze of my wetland mother
Without a castle or a church, I am enough