Poetry

If I had known you were there, I would have stilled my mind, quieting the stories it spun for fifty-four long years. I would have been the daughter I never knew you wanted. But trapped in a prison of lies, was "better" ever possible? It was so long ago— too late to anchor myself in the "if." The bridge is crossed, the water has run its course. I see you through a brighter lens now, because you are still here, loving me with the same heart you held fifty-four years ago. You are "Papa" now— a shining star where a void once lived, a space no longer shrouded by the thorns of old stories. The hole is filled; you are here, and I am, forever, your Angel.

  I kicked at the broken glass of words in the condemned building, where sonnets and poems were once written, where there were once books and notebooks of ideas, where there were once book shelves full of books  now  replaced by broken glass and broken  dreams once words birthed as ideas in the air. A generation of ideas put to paper and spoken to audiences- -everywhere- Shattered memories at my feet seen once as beauty. I ask myself why I’m here in this condemned building Where nothing can be resurrected but fleeting memories of what once was. On the floor now as broken words from a time long ago. What I thought of as a golden calf cannot prosper  as that idea is dead and broken like the glass of the condemned building. I see past it where true life lives in real living breathing words that cannot die. Words that forgive and see past my own folly of false idols and false beliefs Never to be believed at all.