The Memory of Sorrows

 

There's nothing in the world that clings

As does a memory that stings...

~Georgia Douglas Camp Johnson

 

 

Everything is fragile

skyscrapers

 bobby pins

an old woman’s hands

Styrofoam cups

the northern spotted owl

a human heart

you see even the moon has craters

being the old woman that I am

I have come to understand and know this

still my mind forgets all the details

but my heart remembers things

the flickering of starlight

the joyful tears of birth

the song they played at my grandfather’s funeral

falls that scrape more than knees

for words crash like waves upon a shore

relentless like a salesman

and serious like a preacher on Sunday

the memory of sorrows

is a child waiting

 promised a day at the county fair

you can bet your bottom dollar

that day will be remembered

in the joy of going and even more so in the not

it is all the things our hands never hold

that seem to leave the heaviest of weights

for a child never forgets

and one day that boy becomes a man

with a heart that still remembers

what a child cannot forget.

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