Darkness's Hand — a poem about leaving trauma behind

Gold-laden paths up the mountain.
Fluent in screams, I stayed at the bottom.
Drowning in the blood pool,
did I think it would be disrespectful
to step up and out?
It was not my blood, after all,
and the bullets weren't meant for me.
If the heart is still beating,
the soul cannot sleep.
It was not my time
to count sheep.

Cherry blossoms whispered,
The sun will shine soon.
Fair stars and rare coins
tumbled toward then past.
My grandmother and father
still lived and breathed,
I had yet to perceive
the sense of touch
slip from me,
and I still held the potentiality
to turn it all around
with presence and peace.
Pleasant valley afternoons
could have been
claimed and planned
if only I had let go
of darkness's hand.

So now, fourscore and flaxen,
I clip-clop on 24-karat cobblestone
to see what could have been.
The scene is merely brushstrokes,
shifting shadows of long-lost dreams.
Memories dangle like pearls from the trees,
just close enough to spark the feeling
but just far enough to be out of reach.

I ask the cleric
how to exorcise the demons
without setting them loose downtown—
how to trip the light fantastic
without taking the fall—
how the historian avoids becoming
an inanimate pillar of salt.

Answers are muffled now,
buffeted by the cottony softness
of a different dimension,
and I struggle, ear-to-wall,
to discern careful words:
"Don't let your trauma haunt you."

Finally
elsewhere,
I can feel
the tethers snap.

Photo by: Banter Snaps