The Child We Lost

There were shadows in the bedroom

Where the light got thrown by the lamp on the nightstand

On your mother’s side, after midnight, still

You can see it all

You can see it all

And the closet in the corner

On the far back shelf with the keepsakes, she hid

That box there full of letters of regret

By the pictures of the kids

You get faint recollections of your mother’s sigh, countryside drive

And the landscape seen from the window of the backseat with some flowers in a basket

That afternoon after school you and your older sisters

Found your parents in the kitchen at the table

Father lifting off the lid of the box

And a hush fell over everything like a funeral prayer

A reverence, ancestral, heavy in the air

Though you didn’t understand what it meant

That they never said her name aloud around you

Even sitting at the table with her things they’d kept

You recall faintly cards, tiny clothes, and the smell of the paint in the upstairs bedroom

Until then you didn’t know that’s what the box had held

Your parents tiptoeing slowly around always speaking in code

No, they never said her name aloud around you

Only told you it was perfect where your sister went

And you didn’t understand why it hurt them so much then that she’d come and left so soon

Could only guess inside your head at what a “stillbirth” meant

Only knew that mother wept

You watched while father held her, said “some things come but can’t stay here.”

You saw a brightness

Like a light through your eyes closed tight then she tumbled away.

From here, some place

To remain in the nighttime shadows she made

To be an absence in mom, a sadness hanging over her

Like some pentacostal flame, drifting on and off

She was “sister,” only whispered.

Sometimes “her” or

“The child we lost.”

You were visions

A vagueness, a faded image

You were visions

You were a flame lit that burned out twice as brightly as the rest of us did

When you left, you were light, then you tumbled away

There are shadows that fall still here at a certain angle

In the bedroom on the nightstand by your mother’s side

From the light left on there

There’s the box in the closet, all the things kept

And the landscape where she left

Flowers on the grave, marble where they etched that name

And mother cried the whole way home

But she never said it once out loud

On the way back home from where you thought they meant

When they said where sister went

After grandpa got hospice sick and he couldn’t fall sleep

They wheeled his stretcher bed beside her at night

And I saw the light

On the day that he died

By their bed in grandma’s eyes

While us grandkids said our goodbyes

She said “don’t cry”

Somewhere he holds her

Said a name I didn’t recognize

And the light with all the shadows combined