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The Memory of Fog (poem)
all become the same in the fog…
This poem is about my life in the fifth and sixth grades when my mother had succumbed to prescription pills. I would get home from school, do my homework and retreat to a tree fort I had build out of scraps of wood and cardboard found in a wooded area. I usually spent a few hours there before I went home to the home that wasn’t a home.
The Memory of Fog
I picked my way through the fog,
white line by white line,
seeing no farther than the end
of the car, a remembrance of
a childhood spent in dreams
and fantasy.
It covers the cuts and shields
the wounds of the mindless
forgetfulness and the searing
of the knife-sharpened tongues,
honed to a perfect edge by
years of practice and performance.
Enveloped by its thickness, a
seeming protection, a blanket
of safety from the fear of the fight,
the fear of the cry, the fear of
the hunger, the fear…
the fear of the drowning fear.
In a tomb of my own making,
a casket of wood and lathe I hid;
far from the pain and the
reckoning and the suffering,
farther still from the memory
of loss and love.
Fog can erase the memory;
cease time to exist, and
cover dormant fault lines
with a blanket as dense as that
of a wall that serves to divide
a soul in the wanting and the waiting.
Falling darkness, gathering mist &
fading memories all become one &
all become the same in the fog,
in the fog,
in the fog.
