It Matters
(11/26/2021)
For P, L, and A
Someone should have cared
when you were a small child
and needed joy and love breathed into you
yet met with silence, busyness, or harsh blows.
Someone should have been there
that day your dad walked out
and left you, still a child,
to pick up the pieces of the family
and move on;
that gradual season of your mother’s drifting
off into the hazy world of her internal pain,
the fog from which she never quite returned.
Someone should have been angry
should have intervened,
when they saw you
release your childhood all too soon
to pick up the too-heavy burdens
of adulthood,
responsible, before your time.
Someone should have fought
back against the injustice of it all.
Someone should have cared.
Someone should grieve
the sharp edges, the closed doors,
your numbness.
Someone should notice
and understand
the reason you can’t open up,
how life closed in on you
too dark, too young.
Someone should see
your beauty:
oh, that still-existing lovely inside self
locked safe away behind protective walls,
thick layers of defensive space,
the jokes, exhaustion, chronic cheerfulness,
the silence, privacy, inflexibility, and rage.
Someone should love
that inside you,
embrace with time and patience
the dear skittish outside you,
the brave, surviving, smiling face
you learned to wear
because no one cared.
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