Thoughts that have been mulling in the noggin, but finally took form tonight.
Down in that valley my heart remains
A piece forever stripped from me and
Laid bare, out on the terrace
Sitting on a green Adirondack chair
There pulses a piece of myocardium
in that tech booth laughing with creators
and dreamers
and shapers
of young women’s lives
and I wonder
if I need that part of my heart
in order to live
Like soldiers in a jungle or a desert
I was once part of
the band of brothers, sentry of sisters
fighting the fight to keep young women’s
hearts in tact
minds alight with curiosity
Asking ourselves if we were crazy
which we always knew we were
but a good kind
the kind that Ralph Waldo said
was what great men were
Misunderstood
And now in my civilian status I continue the good fight
of shaping the inchoate minds of our future
I still challenge them to challenge themselves
and let their gray matter vibrate to their own
Rhythm
But through open doors of wonder and new thoughts
New worlds
And Yet
I feel alone sometimes
Like no one knows what it’s really like
to have been there
only my fellow crazy soldiers who have ever
been in that valley
on the farm
could know, could understand, could empathize
Time is a healer.
I know that to be true.
Time creates the distance necessary
To make a new place home
A new work, mine.
But I still wonder about that piece of my striated muscle
that continues to throb in the room behind the great window
where that hodgepodge family sits for mass meals
Or up in the fields where the deer roam with soccer net turbans
Or up in that large room where I sometimes sighed
sometimes huffed
sometimes laughed
and often pleaded, “Be Honest with Yourself, Have you really given your best effort?”
All I know is, I did
give my best
In the lifetime of years where I shapeshifted from friend
to sister
to mother
from teacher
to coach
to director
from neighbor
to colleague
and now,
visitor
outsider even.
I do think it may be similar to what returning troops feel
Once discharged
Back in country
A little directionless and
feeling a hole in one’s heart
the kind not easily healed
A piece forever was stripped from me and
Lives down in that valley
Laid bare, out on the terrace
Sitting on a green Adirondack chair
There pulses a piece of myocardium
in that valley laughing with creators
and dreamers
and shapers
of young women’s lives
and though I know I don't
need that part of my heart
in order to live.
I wonder will it continue to beat
outside of me
so others can
hear the spectral love
the way I heard it from my predecessors?
And I think, maybe that's why from my first day
traversing from the plantation home
across the quad
past flagpole and into the creative arch
I felt the special
that is that place
where hearts remain
though people move on.
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