This is ever with me…

i

My attitude unfurls into nights

I’ve risen at 4:00 a.m. to find the mother

Moon, my mother, walking children

Across rough, black-top roads

To hide eternal oncoming cars

Behind her mother. Walking I realized

Death might come that night

Any night so stalked beneath

Her Star God, Yahweh, burning

Into eyes, like Sol, or Bush; soul retried

Between mindfulness, nothingness

Gates often called, another protection

Of vehicle bound for Alpha Centauri,

This was not her child’s man become

So caught hold into adulthood; she reached

Out this final lingering into caves, Sybil

Of forgotten moon mist, rockets into sky

Hundreds of feet beheld as one I launched into day

When this boy became man in my brother

Robert’s eyes; nonsense, mother don’t go,

Mother we are behind you, my brother

Coming home from some city in Missouri,

Land of forgotten snows, where daughter, where

I wept to repent division between labor absolute

Afterthought I was grown or lost in outer space,

There is no father since she’s dying in a land

She called her own. My mother gave my brother

That boy-man up as the brother became

Robert turned eighteen-years-old, she remaried

Soft spoken step-father once again; thus, walked

Into hyer moonlight, my mother so brave

Took me in at age 24 after my only recompence

Suicide attempt, for she never again did, wanted

Me to withstand this deep divide and bowed

Before another visit from my daughter

To her grandpa; my dad will die in agony

Beyond any realizations of his truth, of his

Death, of what he’s done to women, now

Aged at almost eighty-eight, he will die

Not long after, he will have nothing,

And so my mother did finally get her say

“The boys.” she won in spite of cancer,

All those years, she won as dad condemned,

She became Moon woman, walked her children home,

While dad lay rotting in his grave with other

Woman who found him deceitful, my

Step-mom who he mourned his plastic flowers.

Charles Taylor C2018