Footsteps

Footsteps. She sits there all alone at home and turns down her TV. To listen to his footsteps walking through her memory. She hears him as he climbs the steps that lead up to his room. It's fifty some years later, still the child of her womb. She can almost count the steps as he moves across the floor. So real she can't imagine, that he's not there no more. Through troubled times he wrote the rhymes he used to call his own. Sitting in his room upstairs where he stayed all alone. She offers up just one more prayer for peace he'll never find. Asking God to help him through and ease his broken mind. She watched him in his early years, she saw right from the start. This child she once carried, born with a broken heart. There's not a doctor anywhere, no pill that you can take. When the heart you hide inside is made so it will break. Stacks of poems and rhymes he wrote all clutter up the shelf. Now he's out helping others, he can't seem to help himself. So she sits there all alone at home and turns down her TV. To listen to his footsteps walking through her memory. Times she watched him struggle, he tripped and then he fell. Times she tried to save him as his life played out in hell. Times he felt there's no one there. That's when he turned to rhyme. He couldn't hear or see her there. She was right there all the time. Sitting there at home alone she turned down her TV. Waiting for the footsteps that are now a memory. Edwin C Hofert