Letters To The Dead Poem by Linda Marie Van Tassell

Dear Mom,

Those words are so, so foreign to me.
Forgive me if I regret the loss.
Two felled branches from the same tree,
it was destined that our paths would cross.
I know you were tethered to a cloud,
suspended between heaven and hell,
broken inside but so sweetly proud.
It is a story that I know well.

Leaves are falling, absolving your pain.
The land is awash in rustic tones.
I hear the pitter-patters of rain
as it runs a bath to bathe your bones.
I know how you tired, eager to fall
like a bird wounded without a nest
where none could touch you, no one at all.
Sweet arms of death have given you rest.

The house is bare and whispers no more.
The ghost of memories haunts me now.
I blow out the past, unlatch the door,
bid you leave me though I don't know how.
Curtains are drawn; a link has been torn.
I wish you the love you never gave,
wish you the wish I'd never been born,
if it would raise you from out the grave.

The end is bitter; the end is sweet.
The end is leafing in autumn veins.
The end is where we shall once more meet
if there is a god who so ordains.
I wish you the softest, deepest rest;
the quiet poignance of sleeping sound;
a host of good, beautifully blessed,
as you lie sleeping in hallowed ground.

Dear Dad,

I weep for having never known you.
You left too soon I am sad to say.
I know that mom was wrong and untrue,
and you decided to walk away.
You took your life and left me behind,
shattered my soul for all of these years.
You broke my heart and troubled my mind.
I am a water well filled with tears.

You were twenty-three, and I was four!
I have no memories of your face.
Ten days before Christmas, the front door
closed behind you with no tracks nor trace.
You drove like the wind into that tree,
snapping your neck like a thirsty twig,
left me fatherless, ever to be
an empty vessel, a whirligig.

I have no sense of where I belong.
I am deep rooted in ghosts and grief.
I love the most those who did me wrong,
who stole sweet happiness like a thief.
I cannot tell you the emptiness,
the grey-eyed mourning of flesh and bone,
the desolation of nothingness,
the unmarked grave where you slept alone.

I will never get to dance with you.
We ended before we had a start;
and when my life is over and through,
you will remain inside of my heart.
My signature proudly sings your name
though no children will ever wear it.
We are one blood, eternal, the same.
I am your daughter. Yes. I swear it.

Dear Mom & Dad,

I will always be your little girl,
your epitaph written in spirit.
a speck in the spectrum of a pearl,
a tiny voice if you can hear it.
I gather bright stars and blackest night,
let them flow from the tip of my pen,
harvest my heart into rays of light
shining ever and ever, Amen!