The Greatest Gift Given
15 years old.
It was a brain tumor, they’d said.
Holding past the current;
undertow of reality slapping
my fragility cold –
(steel bars won’t hold water –
movement always finds its way)
O’, how the lies twist!
Twist like the dusty branches
on an old, gray apple,
holding appraising rooks
from another’s waking nightmare.
Suicide, they tell me now.
A menagerie of years too late.
Oh…and by the way,
he’s not your real father;
your real father was dead to you
the moment he found out.
This guy’s just The Black-Maker –
(mother stealer; innocence taker)
a mass of dark waiting to fall;
waiting to burrow beneath light skin
(so dark, even the sun lost hope)
exponentially surrendering -
stuck on repeat.
The temper of blood lost, melting
my thin ice –
can you sense the coiled, un-leashed?
Like a waking May snake
tasting the indifferent air for the first time
since snow;
out of its burrow, and striking
its own skin ripe;
bleeding my vinegar still, sweet;
distilling a wicked brew (a science
experiment gone bad)
until the steel breaks
and every molecule of unoccupied space
is reduced to motes; unseen in the shadow
of its dying host.
A ticking time-bomb:
Sex, drugs, drinking – all manner
of loose cutting;
memory re-making, recapturing of
her long dead ghost, exhumed
from its protective bed
of lies –
and how that double edge twists
to this day.
Only now, it twists in wind through
my reclaimed space.
The sign across my chest reading,
OCCUPIED, instead of
SPACE FOR RENT.
37 years old.
It was suicide. This I know –
lies all told. But,
it was also her greatest gift –
her young life tolled; my life,
paid in full through the tears of time.
(dried up like an ancient river still baring
the scars of once was…)
From one parent to their child,
the gift of life remains the greatest gift
of all.
Nothing was ever taken from me.
No…only given -
un-leashed; un-bound; un-coiled.
My own struggle baring weight -
her wrongs come to my light -
I am the Light-Maker now,
and as straight and long as the journey
from one star to the next; and the next, and on.
I have stopped fighting my past and embraced it.
Thanks to all, (life/her/them/Him)
I am learned and open as renewed hope
from the heart
of God.
*For Michael's Un-Twisted contest. This is part of how I un-tiwsted what came to me twisted;
how I un-did my knots, and gave thanks for those knots instead of trying to fight them.
Copyright © Kristin Reynolds | Year Posted 2009
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