The sad stories I first read from my grandfather's
brown scrapbooks will end with me.
I will be the family's last writer,
to wake up in the middle of the night
not wanting my nightmares to fade away quickly,
to stare blankly at walls of old bricks
thinking about the dead and what mystery
they brought with them to the grave unprayed for.
My children will only tell happy stories,
shout them with giggling shoulders, faces --
never write them word by word like moments
fleeting and not wanting to be gone;
nor keep them in journals under the soft matresses,
hushing the journals' cries to be free.
My sons will share them with proud lips --
not learning the language of sickness,
of stirring emotions well-said in poems
that singe the brittle pages of the mind.
They will never hear of babies aborted
from uncaring wombs; of tales better
kept as secrets, untold, and lied about sometimes;
of faces hidden in rooms like old family furnitures
kept in unvisited ancestral houses;
of scars hidden in sleeves, but kills when one
moves his arms; of unfulfilled promises
written in burned diaries and forever unknown.
My daughters do not have to hold pencils,
and think with eyes as red as a pen's smudge --
the papers will be nothing but love letters,
notes in school, their minds holding nothing
but good memories well-shared through
small talks on the way home,
or over recess in the school's playground.
My children's mouths will never burn with lies,
their lips will be of pink and rose-red;
knowing that words are better exclaimed on hilltops
and echoing caves, than written in letters --
still as the dead, read in silence on journeys
and in wakes.
