(Note: #18 of a 23-part sequence, Little Boy Blue: A Memoir in Verse, CavanKerry Press)



18

When I look back at the girl I was, she is as distant as a heron
at the end of the marsh,
but each year the fog about her grows thinner & thinner—
the fog of stupidity & prejudice––
& of the sorrow I feel for my mother who feared scorn,
whose buried dreams
wracked her body, for my father’s belief no decent man
would ever have me. What were
the moonscape scratchings of that girl’s nature that had
her keep the child despite
each voice’s admonition? How did she school herself into
a generous life? I’d like to think
she saw a pattern beyond the evident confusion, but that
wasn’t so. She was lost & at risk,
probably delusional. Still she lived, the child I was who
bore a child, as if she knew that if only
she’d grow light enough, there was someplace I’d finally
carry her.