December 26, 2004
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When I was a girl, my grammar school playground replaced it’s rusty teetering slides and squeaky, lanky swings with a bright and careful, plastic play scape that we took to calling the “Big Toy.” The Big Toy had many tubes for crawling and monkey bars for dangling, but my favorite component of it was a glider that you could hang on to and push off with your feet to take you from one side of the Big Toy to the next. Barreling through the air, free and fast, I would pretend to be a flying squirrel, a magical fairy, an adventurer soaring on vines through the jungle, or whatever struck my whimsey.
One day, while flying over a bubbling sea of hot lava as a cave girl, a classmate came rushing carelessly in my path. Vulnerable and out of control, I clamped my eyes shut and prayed for a miss. Unlucky and exposed, he slammed streight into my chest, and my skinny body was flung onto the ground. I tried to cry out, I tried to speak, but my poor little chest couldn’t even breathe. It was the first and only time in my life that the wind was knocked out of me.
Until this Christmas, I had forgotten what getting the wind knocked out of you felt like. My chest became tight and impossible in the aftermath of our family’s Christmas dinner as a nightmarish version of my mother raged while I straightened up her kitchen. For reasons all too unnecessary, my mom had decided that we abandon our fondue to listen as she verbally assaulted my middle brother. Her ridicule went far beyond the realm of the evenings encounters, and her reasoning was buried under years worth of disconnect with her and my brother, as well as her and my brothers father.
This poem was written in exhaustion, without breathing–my chest vulnerable, constricted, and impossible. This is a poem written with love, with hope for my brother.
As always, your comments are welcome, your criticisms are appreciated, and your readership is cherished. Thank you.
_____________________________________________________________________________ Prodigal Son
I am my father’s son.
The soft tap of my pulse
reverberates in his ears
like the steps of an ancient predator.
The patriarchs choice is involuntary.
It is the decision of all who came before him,
the decision of survival:
My death or his exile;
I exist to replace him.
A twisting double helix
ropes around my young and clumsy body-
slithering, seething bondage.
Hacking away at these binds
in a primal bushman frenzy,
I’ve severed my ties to history.
I’ve thwarted the great design.
Panting, I greedily inhale my freedom.
The earth beneath my feet is ripe and welcoming,
the sky above without bounds.
Resting at last, I sink into the warm, familiar cradle of the earth.
My head feels pleasant and heavy upon the gentle slope of her shoulder.
Smelling of tangerine skins, aloe, and rye,
She whispers love into my ear
as she quietly accommodates
the vines of my inheritance
to snake around me once again.
Comments (5)
This is beautiful. You have an gorgeous sense of language, I felt rythm, I saw imagery, I slid through this piece. This is the kind of work that I want to write and the kind that i love to read. I will have to say that I thought the narrative that prefaced the poem was more artfully executed, but only because i thought some of the language of the poem was a little heavy handed–some of the wording could have been simpler and would have drawn me back to the story and rythm of the piece. Just a suggestion. It was beautiful, no less.
peace. M. Y
I loved your poem, as well as the rest of your post. I was glad to see you post again; I’ve been checking every day.
I have seen too many montrous versions of my parents to even go to their house on holidays. You are truly brave!
Hey. Great post. A brave poem. The intro was wonderfully written… I’m sorry you had to deal with that over the holidays.
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