Roses

Mommy said you wouldn't come back,
you wouldn't make us cry anymore.
And she was right--you didn't come.
But we still always cried.

We had no place to stay,
nor someone to ask for help.
I remember that first night.
I took the bench, mommy took the ground.
She didn't sleep that night,
and later I know I felt her cry.

And after weeks of tribulation,
a kitchen table was our prized possession.
Until the roses came.

Anonymously delivered to our personal hell,
my mother placed them proudly atop the surface.
I thought things were going well.

Then the roses on the table died.
I know they were from you.
Mommy never said they were,
but as red turned to black, she cried,
and I knew.

I always asked her on Father's Day,
who was I to give my school-made present to?
I shouldn't have asked.
I didn't know.
That every year when those words escaped my lips,
she would cry, holding
the remains of dried roses she kept in her drawer.

And when I grew older I missed you,
and I wondered why you'd not come back.
How it seemed mom was trying less
to get me to believe her about you.
So I would cry.

In those dark hallways of my childhood,
a darkness clung to every corner,
a shadow suffocated our lives.
And when the moonlight peeked its way through
a sound surfaced
and I knew,
my mother was still crying.

So I don't understand
why it is that you left
knowing that for every one of my tears
ten of hers had been wasted.

One night I knew things changed.
I felt it, and started to cry without knowing.
When I entered my mother's room
there she lay,
unmoving.

Across her chest, a dark dirt strewn
at closer glance I realized,
the roses.

I hated and admired you,
you left us and yet,
certainly it would not come without
consequence.

My body may not have died for all intent
but my mother's gone
and my will is lost in the roses.