You left your poetry in your sister’s room
Face up
On the bed
Calling to me
Like a wolf
Calls to the moon
And I, shining moonbeams in the dark
Read your words
Into my world
Expressions of yourself
I never ventured to guess
You would serve up
On our cheapest china
The dish you had just learned to create
But couldn’t eat yourself


Today I tasted your soul
A delicacy I dared never consume
In your own language
Which I might never speak or comprehend
But there -
I did fathom -
Reflections of me
And yet
Clearly not me
Your walls were so high
So fortified
So camouflaged
That I did not see them
At all
Until you left open the garden door
Face up at page one
So that a collision with me was certain

Today I tasted your soul
The inky blackness I thought only I knew
Echoes of my own youth
Bearing down, now, on both of us
I struggled to see through my tears
Blinking and blinking to clear the way ahead
But your visions of your own heart
Lunged at me from your angular descriptions
Becoming as real for me
As any daggers from my own fears

I thought only I knew
The daggers hidden in shadows
And I thought I had conquered them
So you might escape
For insurance,
I even cast all my sunshine
All my love
All my best energy
Right into the crevices of your everywhere

Nevertheless your words
Moulded over your darkness
Gave shape and substance
Until I wept
For the bleakness of my effort
Gagging on the bitterness you’ve gathered up
For me to read
For today
I tasted your soul

01/12/2004

Author's Note: This weekend, my 15 yr old daughter asked me if she could borrow some paper so she could write, and I gave her some. She left it out, in an obvious place, for me to find, even though she has her own place to put her private things when she stays with me. Reading her words took my breath away from the sobbing. She wrote of such anguish inside herself, I ached to read of it.

Posted on 01/13/2004
Copyright © 2025 Alison McKenzie