A Private Revolt

September 16, 2011 at 5:04 pm (Poetry)

Three years, I have carried him:
head on my bony shoulder,
bottom on my forearm cradle.
Sometimes chattering at the dark,
Sometimes fussing with a cold,
He fidgets with his father’s warm skin.

He sleeps no other way.
The softness of mother and pillow
incites rebellion
against unconsciousness and rest,
a discomfort at the prospect
of lost comfort,
and he dives around the bed
and into her
with delightful peals
of insomnia.

No isolated crib could isolate
us from his ceaseless cries,
from the anguish of causing him
anguish.
We run to him,
prison guards become saviors.

Is it our fault?
Are we to blame?
Had we been harder sooner,
would it be less hard now?
Or would there merely be
a hardness, consistently?

He is a loving boy.
I have hated him at times–
when my body,
racked with fatigue
with illness
would not allow me
to carry him with ease.
When that chattering voice
would eviscerate
my world of private thought.
When my weakness with others
made me use strength
against him,
I have hated him.

I have hated him,
when the question came back uncertain: Can I carry him
another three?

I picture an old man
being carried by an elder,
a knobbed back protesting
against a weight
it should never have had to carry.
Nurses in a nursing home
look on,
first with an awed concern,
later with indifference
over the pages of a magazine.

Until he finds his eternal rest,
I cannot rest;
I will not leave him
restless.

And, in my commitment,
it is god that I blame.
The lord of us all
is the lord of all pain.

For my son, I indict him.

With shotgun arms,
I cast nets of hell,
I will drag him where he belongs
and never let him rise.