The Punctuation of Forgiveness

Poetry — By Dick Freed on August 5, 2012 at 12:00 pm

Smoke and haze;
phantoms amid the shadows of memory –
interludes from childhood,
shared moments, words spoken –
I search for them, but I cant’ find them…

Why don’t I remember?
Were there no good days?
Now you’re leaving me,
and I want to have something to hang on to;
but nothing’s there…

Starched white shirts and clip-on ties,
shiny black Hanover lace-ups – that’s what I’ve got;

The shepherd got sheared,
and the sheep made out like bandits
while we feasted on the leftovers…

Years together on the open sea, then gone;
I wasn’t there when that ship sailed,
but I was witness to the shipwreck -
the long, tortured slide into the abyss
While the survivors perished arranging deck chairs…

She got the first one – a hard act to follow;
you got the second, though I swear it nearly killed you both;
I existed, stuck somewhere between the trenches,
out in the naked void where the barbed wire cut deep
and the poisoned air still hung…

“Now we see in a glass dimly…”
(Oh God, Was that really you I glimpsed just now amid the shards?)
“The Father is in me and I am in the Father”
– damn -
my Skywalker moment…

So what are you supposed to do
when it’s your heart
that offends you?

I have at times hated you,
ridiculed you,
pitied you
all, it seems now,
without really ever really knowing you,
Or me…

“Yet it was our weaknesses he carried;
it was our sorrows that weighed him down….
…he was wounded and crushed for our sins;
he was whipped and we were…
healed…”

Now you’re leaving me,
and I am very much sad;
but at last, I have something of us to hang on to -
quod ex patre filioque procedit -
“It is finished.”