Category: childhood

Family Portrait

Revisiting past posts as I take this time to gain balance. Photo circa 1975.

Family Portrait

Note: My youngest sister (pictured on the left) and myself (in the middle facing the camera) are the only “survivors” of our family chaos. Mom passed this past May; our eldest sister (next in the lineup) died at 43 of cancer; Aunt D, next to me, of cancer at 68; our other sister suffers schizophrenia and Parkinson’s lives in long-term care; the baby of the group lost to heroin addiction and what we now recognize as human trafficking in her late teens.

Intangibles

Mother followed all the trends –
Scarsdale and grapefruit diets,
minis and maxis,
platforms and pumps –
reaching for an ideal
my child’s mind
could not comprehend

Father dreamt of a voice makeover
had flown his ancestral roots
in search of…what?
I did not know

I learned that men
were to be pleased,
and compassion
was a woman’s role
and it was folly to hazard
confrontation when alcohol
was in the mix,

Intangible as life was
I deduced that secrets –
the avoidance of scandal –
rendered women ineffective

and by the very circumstance
of my birth, I was tainted,
weighted by shame
destined to endure
pain as love
invested in
my worthlessness

Except life is evolution
and rage emerges
from oppression
and conviction
smashes the impotence
of ideals, embraces
the abstracts
of fluidities,

and merging out of shame
I see that struggle
is opportunity

and that rewriting legacies
is an honourable goal
and I do have power
in any given moment…

only wish
I had known it
sooner.

(Art my own)

Paralysis

Paralysis desecrates floorboards
leaves me suspended…
the skeletons of lost dreams
sprawled out beneath me…
disordered

I am powerless
against the nightly haunts:
a dispirited youth
a righteous mother,
that lonesome child…

Judgment has a long shadow
and slits for eyes…
I don blinders –
tunnelled between
guilt and loathing

This onslaught,
this psychic terrorism
mocks my immobility
forces me to mine
forgotten pith

Survival, instinctual,
steels against the assault
raises prayer
as antidote

An armless attempt
to assert will over fear –
hoping strength restores
vulnerability’s war cry.

(Image mine)

Red Shoes

Mama says wear red shoes
Gives a woman power

But I wobble and stumble
six inches makes me tower

So I trade in my stilettos
for a crimson pair of docs
and much to Ma’s dismay
some days I don crocs

It’s not the shoes that determine might
I tell her, but the soul in the fight.

(Photo: Mom and red accessories – shoes no doubt match. She is posing with her baby brother.)

Stories

Trees have a story,
buried in their roots,
refined by seasonal passages,
etched in scarred bark

Birds know these stories
Sing their praise, unapologetic –
and we can hear them too,
if we only learn to listen

I have a story
birthed from parental lips
delineated by the jostling
of our many limbed life

It states that I am the good one,
the responsible, the brilliant,
the child of hope and valour…
this story is not mine

I am a tree, whose scars
suggest a history, whose roots
remain hidden, and whose voice
was lost in familial tempests

The birds know it, though
and carry my essence
on winged notes, back
to source, where I am written.

(Art my own)

Colouring Lessons

Favourite colour?
Black, says she
without hesitation

I falter, stumble,
mind reaching –
who likes black?

Is that a colour?
It’s all colours!
She’s nonchalant

intent on task –
carefully keeping
within the lines

Of course it is...
ill equipped am I
to disagree, images

of dark somber
corners, sorrow
and death crows –

Why black? ask I,
composure forced –
had anticipated pink

equate childhood
with primary shades,
splotches of yellow

and rainbow skies,
candy red apples
on lollipop trees

But black? No –
black obliterates,
negates, destroys

It holds the colour
inside, she explains.
It’s the outline.

Not annihilation –
order; her mind
conceives of order

So much to learn
from innocence,
have long forgotten

the art of staying
within lines, finding
good in all things.

(Colouring Lessons first appeared here June, 2017. Image my own)


Snapdragons

Snapdragons transport me
back to Father’s gardens –
the pleasure of pinching
delicate floral lips

Forbidden, was I
tiny feet banished from
tiers of ordered colours –
how he worshipped those rows

Hours spent on knees,
as if in prayer… attention
lavished on nurturing growth
while I shrivelled on sidelines

Longed to dig beside him,
sully my hands and share
his passion, ignorant of
an inner drive to weed

Felt only walls of separation
the coldness of perfection,
so in my wilful way,
I rebelled against taboos

On tiptoe, stepped between
the bobbing arrangements
marred the well-tended soil
and pinched the snapdragons.

(Snapdragons first appeared here in March, 2018. Edited for this edition. Art my own)