I Never Knew Her
But I always knew of the pain in my clan,
Of the burden that sat on the shoulders of my blood.
I learned to walk on thin ice
Never felt she was mine to feel
Because I never met her and
I don’t know
What she was like,
How she smelled and how she smiled.
She wasn’t mine to feel.
But I was only running from myself
When the grief was chasing me down
When it stabbed me in the heart and in the back and I could no longer ignore the blood spilling from my chest.
I was a fool.
But I tried to escape the pain of her
So maybe I was just a fugitive.
But is it a crime for what I am revealing?
That even after all this time
I might feel something for her
That maybe I’d feel the loss of the woman she was.
How her feet no longer traveled the earth
How her voice would never pass my ears
How her smile and laugh would never be directed at me
And in secret I often look at the pictures
Analyzing her every feature.
I search for something I might recognize in her
That maybe there is a part of her in me.
I look in desperation
Day after day
But I can’t find what I’m looking for.
Nothing I find will ever fill the void in my heart.
I’ve built houses in the town of the organ that sustains my life
For each person I love
For each to run free and explore,
But her lot remains empty
Her furniture is covered in dust
And her lawn is yellow and dry
Her house is full of images I try to force in,
To place them as if they’d live there forever.
But they would never be who she was.
The pictures are still
And even the photographs of her
Don’t know of me.
Because I never knew her and
She never knew me.