we tell our children tales
they may not be old enough to hear
but parents are absolved
it may be sometimes hard to know
just which these are
when i was young
i heard the story of a woman
brain damaged
who knew no one she loved
when her son came into her room
she could not tell him from a stranger
and politely said hello
and yet the devices they had upon her heart
showed it beating wildly
when i was young
this filled me with terror
not from fear of becoming what woman was
but from the towering mysteries
of synapses and soul
and how the former nestled in the latter
desperately needing to know
it truly does
i was a precocious child
___________
now precocious still
and in many ways a child
i am content to leave
the mysteries unknown
and trust to God to hold them
but now i fear I have the woman’s lot
and maybe do not know
the things that i should know
and politely live and wonder
if it’s still beating
wildly
wildly
Very good piece, Neil. Thank you for sharing it. Makes me think of a story I heard just a year or so ago about a man who had surgery to remove a tumor in his lung and doctors discovered the cause was a small seed that he had inhaled that had begun to sprout into a tree. There’s something so beautiful about the image of a tree growing in a person’s lung, but also the haunting reality that it stood to kill him.
I like this one a lot Neil. My favorite line is, “the towering mysteries of synapses and soul.”