I meant to return long before this
but in looking back we learn too much
of loss and I dreaded that.
Now going through the house
and my parents’ lives
too revealed by what they saved
and what they left behind
for me to find, I feel nothing
but pain for the past
trying to understand
how I fell so short of what I intended
to do with my life.
How life twists and turns
against us. How a childhood
is not really understood
until it is lived a second time
in memory. How wonderful
and how terrible
it seems now
because it is gone
and because it was mine.
~ from The Heart of All That Is: Reflections on Home
edited by Jim Perlma, Deborah Cooper, Mara Hart, and
Pamela Mittlefehldt (Holy Cow! Press, 2013)
