Breakage

About facing my greatest fear.

When first you hold your own mortality

inside a bundle of cloth and flesh, its eyes

searching you and for the first time you

are at once found and lost together, it is

with a trembling wary soul that you sleep,

imagining trains that suddenly careen

into unsuspecting little ones while they nap

and floods that devour in great heaving gulps.

In truth, you never fully sleep again.

That what you have created could ever

be touched by death's cruel hand or

that this pristine cloak of innocence

be pierced, sits as an unfathomable

horror in your chest, a weight

that will not be lifted.

When this unspeakable flash of

nightmare actually finds you, breaks

the veil of vigilant imagination, snatching

this thing you hold a top the raging waters,

sparing your own breath to hold it

against harm, you think you will shatter,

each piece flying apart from the others,

a permanent fracturing of a thousand

well laid illusions of cells and plans.

It is with numb wonder that you remain

intact, if floating slightly above yourself,

in a protective trepid bubble.  You wander

stale white hallways, pausing in corners to 

take in  the suggestion of breath, the world

having transformed into the kind of place 

capable of stealing children and tossing

them haphazard into oncoming traffic.

You become one of those who carries this

ugly truth, hiding it under your jacket,

a gaping hole within your chest.

You obsess, sitting by a hospital bed

watching numbers go up and down

and breaths coming and going,

pinning all hope to a faulty green line

as it moves and the futile belief that you

can command these few numbers

to rise and fall.

Author's Note

This is about my son who was in a severe motorcycle accident and nearly died. It is about facing the fear with which every parent must come to terms.

Reviews

[jacob erin-cilberto]

incredible metaphors bring this love for our children so much too life.

[Kristina Moulaison]

Thanks for this. I appreciate it!