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Emptiness – I have known you perhaps since infancy
when I cried so incessantly when my parents put me down to sleep.
Was it maybe because I was fearful that some void would swallow me up
were I to close my eyes? My parents followed the doctor’s advice and let me
scream it out for a few nights. Eventually I succumbed to early bedtime.

Emptiness – I recall you as I sat forlornly in the bus which picked me up 
from my grandparents’ yellow farm house out in the country, the place
 my mother returned to with me and my three sisters when she left my father.

I remember that emptiness as I sat alone on that bus, and also as I did
whatever it was I did in my strange little kindergarten class until my mother
moved us to a nearby city where we walked everywhere we went,
and where we lived on welfare cheese, macaroni, milk and peanut butter.

Always I’d had my sisters to play with me, so why did emptiness envelop me
on those days I swung so high in the air at the Riverside Park, swinging away
feeling eluded by the purpose of life, and feeling like something was missing?

I’d go to church, hear the sermons and the hymns. They did not phase me.
Oh, here come the Miller Girls, the folks there probably whispered,  
eyeing our shabby dresses. Because we had no car, church members 
would come to get us. I felt a little like a burden at those times, and I recall
looking forward to those few times my father came from his state so far away
to visit me and my sisters. But emptiness would visit me in those times.
He was mentally ill after all, but a girl could always dream . . .

Very soon my mother remarried. Our family’s size greatly increased
along with chaos, but also along with very great times! I learned so much.
I searched for and found friends. The emptiness I’d grown so familiar with
grew smaller and smaller, yet sometimes, even now - decades later -
emptiness drops by, plops itself down and simply stares me in the face.

Feb. 12, 2023
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