Love Bleeds Through The Cracks Of My Broken Heart Poem by Linda Marie Van Tassell

You were relegated to a guestbook of powder blue,
pressed in loving memory between the tear-stained pages,
and stored within a cedar chest at the foot of her bed.
I knew you as father, but I never really knew you.
My thoughts of you were just that - thoughts - thoughts that grew in stages
as I imagined you within my heart and in my head.

She never wanted to talk about you except to say
you died in Vietnam so, of course, a hero was born.
Little girls need someone to look up to and so did I.
Now and then, I would sneak a peek and then put you away,
terrified that she would get mad and yell at me with scorn.
She was always angry, and I never understood why.

It was weird. It was like we could never mention your name.
You were always on the periphery just out of sight,
peering around the corners of a past - intangible.
You had no voice and no presence; yet, you lived just the same.
You were her husband and my father, but I had no right
to ask questions. She was cold, heartless, and infrangible.

I never thought of her as a widow. She never mourned.
She was emotionally absent and controlled with fear.
She did not want us to know about you and him and her.
She was narcissistic and insecure; and she adorned
herself with many men over the years, making it clear
that we were unwanted reminders, a thorn and a burr.

It wasn't until I was nineteen that I learned the truth.
She could never be the mother that she wanted to be.
She was broken and tortured by her own choices in life.
She inflicted so many wounds with each lie and untruth.
It is laughable to say that we were a family.
You were dead, and she never played the good and faithful wife.

No! She welcomed your best friend into your marital bed
and continued to lay with him even after you were gone,
even when she drove you to drive yourself into the grave.
She did not feel any remorse but carried on instead;
and we, your dutiful daughters, your disremembered spawn,
were treated as less than nothing, a whipping post, and slave.

When I finally found you, I fell down upon my knees.
My dear, sweet hero lay long forgotten without a name.
I never came to visit as I knew not where you lay.
I found and lost that part of me no other man can seize.
Fort Hill guards you day and night beneath an eternal flame
and winter's wings nostalgically carry me today.

I have been starved of you, seeking scraps but gathering none.
A blackbird falls from a leafless tree, and the willow weeps.
She leans into the wind, her long tresses sweeping the ground;
and another day ends in silence with the setting sun.
The past is done, and its legion of night its murmur keeps,
eternally whispering but never making a sound.

For reasons unknown to me, I am trapped in knotted vines.
The loss of love, the fatal lies are all I've ever known.
I cannot find you in the bottom of this empty well.
I am desperately seeking solace between flowing lines,
languishing with every breath in solitude all alone.
I never knew the loss of you would suffer me to hell.

And yet, I live another day to shake out all the shame,
to find some recompense in this burden upon my back,
and walk within the shadow of the pain you left behind.
Am I a waste of time, an empty vessel without claim?
Is this struggle worth the inner happiness that I lack?
I do not know for, although I see, sometimes I feel blind.

I dreamed my way into your heart, to place my hand in yours,
smiled the smile a daughter feels in the chambers of her heart.
I cried until white blossoms opened like the opal moon;
and found despite the passing years, my love for you endures.
I touched the face I never knew, my thoughts of you impart.
I called for you and cried for you an hour none too soon.

The cedar chest exists no more; its contents can't be told.
Remnants of you in powder blue were all I ever had.
For all the pain with nought to gain, there is no counterpart;
and your story in my story, its pages yet unfold.
Turning slowly day by day, some are happy, some are sad.
Most of all, the love bleeds through the cracks of my broken heart.