Photo by Eric Muhr on Unsplash

The Foot Path to My Soul

Generations of suffering created the roots of my tree

Like a bougainvillea’s new growth that floats in the breeze

Flowers that take your breath away with their glittering scent

Piercing the softest of skins with their bristling thorns

My mother birthed by a wealthy clan that shuffled her to and fro

from nanny to boarding school to husband in the blink of an eye

That simple loving should never be quite so hard

Never knowing if her father was her father or a bridge far away

My father, his ancestors, crossed the ocean deep and wide

Family after family of farmers living on God’s green earth

Discovering his father in the mangled wreck of a carriage

On his eighteenth birthday a single bullet in his daddy’s head.

So much of my life cowering in the corners of fate

Hiding in the dust that surrounded me in a haze

Pretending to hold myself together without seeming to care

For the past is the twisted past and it’s all just an act

So help me my mother I cried out so loud