Stories housed within the soul
exact in every detail,
the deliberate forgetting
of a mind linked to survival
inoperable in the secret register
where every encounter’s sacred
despite the pain or tragedy;
the look on Bobby’s face telling me
our best friend Brendan’s dead,
my father’s eyes down
who should have borne the weight;
Brendan’s look the night before
his cigarettes in a rolled up sleeve,
a fierceness to his fate
I knew but could not fathom;
two moments of so many years
and more the stories of ancestral past
inherited through the blood
or some marvel of the life force
so who they were and all they suffered
would never be forgotten.
Years ago my father and I
walked upon Roscommon Road
and there we met an old woman
in peasant black and ruddy face
her bright eyes shining as she met
the man who should have been her son.
My father’s eyes were down of course,
he would not bear this weight
so I took it as I had learned to do
and looked into her tear filled face
with all the questions she’d never answer,
happy for the son alive she’d hoped to carry;
one chapter in a secret story,
the library of my soul to guide and witness
his coat and tie and shiny shoes
that kept him from the mud filled yard
where love was lost, one truth abandoned.
I haven’t forgotten to remember Mary
or Roscommon Road, and the place
within her empty womb
where nothing less than life itself
still waited to be born.