We were the grandchildren of cigarette burns
And peacocks in the front yard.
Of jumping into muddy pond water after frogs.
Of blessings from my mother’s old first communion prayer book,
The one with the angels that keep kids from falling off flowery cliffs.
The magic 8 ball was forever giving us cryptic answers
To simple questions
Forcing us down the road to inner wisdom.
My brother took one direction
And I another.
His prayers are certain and well-trod.
Mine are crafted in dark rooms
with moth wings in boxes
And birdsong defying the window glass.
Two children,
Two lives,
Too long apart to speak the same tongues anymore.
Heading home without directions,
The lonely memory
of small hands touching
is the only safe rest stop.
Stacy Doney is a mixed media artist and writer living in Northeastern Maryland. As a child she lived in Virginia and Massachusetts, but loved her grandparents home in the Catskills of NY the best. She left a career in social work to study art and writing while raising two teenagers. Her motherly instinct extends to spiders, bees, and trees, and shows up in her work.
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