What is a memory when all who share it are gone?
A useless void of time and place
shown through a series of tattered old photographs.
There is no voice, no pulse left to describe
the joy that was once held.

For carelessness has cast away all once precious to me,
yet with the constant flashes of life’s fast pace
I now find a struggle to hold on to sanity.
Airplanes, a vulgar contraption made to spiral my eldest to death.
The noble pay tribute to the noblest;
so why
must the winner lie forever in a box for their country?

The Legacy comes with a price.

How often I wonder
the reason that the strong must continually be tested.
The pangs of emotion well up within me.
Two sons devoted to a dirty game,
so passionate to begin a change;
with one vile moment all hope is gone
and their names are offered up to history.
I felt my pulse quicken as the world stopped
and the violence played over and over.
I learned from the insensitive television that
my president, my son, was gone.
A second murder showed the cruelty of the world
to accompany his brother in his new soil covered home.
The depths of my despair remain unspoken.

The legacy comes with a price.


A loss is a loss, each individually horrific.
I sit with muted anguish and regret:
if only I had broken the silence, defied my upbringing
and resisted the head of the house’s opinion.
Nevertheless, his choice was made out of love,
it had to be,
she entered that room of Dr. Freeman’s,
content with herself,
a feeling so many still search for.
Her father never believed it to be enough
and so though her operation was a success, her life had turned
for the worse.
It was unfair, unjust and simplistically devastating:
she would never be the same,
her name remained but that once glimmering personality had
dwindled from existence
forever.

The legacy comes with a price.

I know of words softly spoken in the ear
meant to intrigue those who lead little lives;
words of affairs ringing with disloyalty as whispers
proceed to regard me as a fool.
Seldomly,
I allow an intrusion to pass my wall of solitary faith.
Yet I know of my man and all he does, however
men will be men.
I will not speak of the wrongs the past has hushed.
For that history is not worth repeating.
The sun and sky of a cloudless spring day
paired with laughter of my loves running near,
bring all the joy my heart needs to recall
before the dark veil had consumed.

The legacy comes with a price.