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No neat package, tied with ribbon and a bow.
Bright coloured wrapping paper? Paint it Black.
Forgiveness and resolution is the goal;
all I have is process: grim, unrelenting and a lack
of direction (no instructions provided),and
a vague process to achieve it, broken and ragged,
twisted and jagged; littered with shards of broken dreams,
sharp as glass, to rip and tear one’s very soul.
It is not really about family, culture or race;
it’s all that, and so much more.
Put your very reason for living to the test.
Do you live, or die a slow, lingering death
of the soul, the joy of living?
While twisting and turning in the chains
of personal and ancestral guilt.
Uncle Ed did what? Do I have to share his shame?
The living, are not two dimensional;
we are definitely, vibrantly technicolour 3D
and so much more! We carry in our DNA
and our cerebral cortex recordings of every event
in our life; and through that the actions,
motivations and emotion of those
who preceded us. It is not spectral,
or illusory; it just is.
Let me tell you a story, of a person in my life,
for whom I feel equally so much Love and Anger.
I have trouble seeing him as distinct and separate;
for I see and hear in him, me, his mother.
(Oh, how they fought!), those dreadful arguments;
the acrimony, the absolute Love.
She is dead, he is not; so, to that degree, she lives on;
there, just out of reach. Memories I would rather not remember.
So, let us not talk of ghosts or shades;
such are yours to believe.
It’s in the blood racing through the arteries
and veins from heart to brain, and back
It’s perceived through the senses (if not understood),
but it’s real: I see him, and behind him, her, her mother,
generations past. So, who do I forgive? For what?
What is done, is done. The slate has been wiped clean.
So, why repeat the same lines? Time to unpack
and discard; buy a new ticket, take a new track.
“Pardon me ... is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo”?
“Track 29”?
Les Bush
5 April 2013
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