I gazed upon his face
In death, so unlike the dimpled brother that I knew.
I loved him before I tumbled from my first cautious step,
My hand so firmly squeezed within his childish grasp.
My first dance, and my last ... both I took within his arms.
And yesterday ...
How hollowly did my heart echo within its ribbed cage
How dark the clouds, how thunderous the storm that overtook my soul
And she, the black widow, scurried across the smoldering embers of my hatred,
scarcely singed.
Nonbelieving, I stared through vacant tear-brimmed orbs
Wrenched from the silent shell of my sorrow by her maniacal laughter,
It pierced our shrouded grief and
The door closed.
Mutely, almost blindly, I maneuvered gravestones, clutching a single white lily stolen moments before the chicken little sky fell in.
Already a memorial of delicate rose petals encircled his small stone.
Forlornly my lily joined the white carnation there enclosed,
And my chest heaved, for the first time, ragged relief
That our father lay cold beneath the hardened clay.
Surely the venom of this day would have stilled his heart.
How cold the tentacles of seething hatred that grow within my chest.
I would, while my detest yet scorched in the midday sun,
That it had cauterized my grieved soul and left me quiet
Encased within the sepulchre of my memories,
but it did not.
I do not know why the wasp dies after its venomous sting
Yet the black widow lives to weave a gauzey tomb.
How cruel that watery grave of Windmill Pond.
© Lotus D. Cirilo, August 22, 1999
