Michael Christopher Poem by Linda Marie Van Tassell

Backward into Richmond, into the back wood thickets,
I journey down the dirt road girdled by stalks of corn
where the heat is mustered with songs of summer crickets
who sing of those who wish that they had never been born.

The rusted ribs of a rake are hallowed by the years
and lay forgotten among the earth and fading weed,
and a black cloud spills its secrets in loquacious tears
that fill up buckets with the release of precious need.

Times were different back then; and no one spoke a word
of the hush things, the dirty things that happened at night,
when he climbed into her bed and her cries went unheard
as he took and took and she granted without a fight.

She hid within herself as he took her SELF, her soul,
wishing she were somewhere else, anywhere else but there;
but pawing hands and thrusting hips have ways to cajole
with threats that thread through fingertips pulling at her hair.

Moonlit nights and moonless nights and many nights ago,
hydrangeas 1 blossomed within the garden of her throat.
A broken tree on bent knees covered with flakes of snow,
she shivered as he buckled up then buttoned his coat.

A thousand stars in the sky and not a wish come true.
The secret slipped under her skin like a prayer bird.
He appeared, crowning, with the glistening morning dew;
and the unmentionable was hidden without word.

He opened his blue eyes before they took him from her
and looked into the eyes that were so much like his own;
and she endowed him with the name, Michael Christopher,
before they took him and left her in silence – alone.

“Once upon a time” never gave her the wings to fly
away from the ashes that embroidered her skirt.
Though she glimpsed it from her cage, she never touched the sky.
She lay there abandoned and embittered in the dirt.

The shadow of an unsung brother lives in my bones
waiting to be summoned into the green summer haze,
to spill out of my skin and go skipping across stones
to reclaim the mother he once captured in his gaze.

And how shall I tell him, if ever he should appear,
that the ghost of her memory is haunting me still,
while her remains are buried not far away from here,
beyond the eternal flame in the earth at Fort Hill?

I always wanted a brother and had him and yet
I have never seen his eyes or his smile or his face.
I am drawn by my senses; and I cannot forget,
my blue eyes searching the utter soundlessness of space.

As the sky slips into autumn’s dress of amber sway,
a handful of leaves flutter on a breath of the wind;
and a stream of tears shimmers as I glance far away
catching the distance as it slides around the bend.

She held me in her arms but never within her heart,
and there was always a certain sadness about her.
The son was in her sky, and I never played a part.
She was a cloud, and the rain sang, “Michael Christopher.”


1 Hydrangeas, meaning: heartlessness