Root Quest
•
he walks with staggered step
an uneven broken cadence
for he stumbles with the sins
of his unknown father
resigned to the weight that presses
and bears him bent in melancholy
he does not waver from his path
nor hesitate in his journey
for his stride is for more than one
whose fate he does hold aloft
and through whose pulse and heart
his lifeblood now courses in kind
each step keeps the dream with breath
that over the approaching rise
he will encounter the enigma
which is his fire and source
• • •
rob kistner © 2011
Another dark piece laced with
dark light, light that emanates
from places unseen and unknown,
yet you can find your way, like
a sojourn in the moonlight.
The synchronicity of spirit between
us is phenomenal, for I never knew
my father; just a sad succession of
stepfathers. I used to fantasize that
one day, somewhere, in a cafe, a store,
a theater, and I would look up and see
an older version of me staring my
direction incredulously. Never happened,
and so I never saw my autoimmune
process approaching like a dark cloud
twenty years ago, never went fishing
with him or felt his belt on my butt,
or his arms hugging me. So this poem
shot through me like a spearhead;
thanks.
I was abandoned at birth to an orphanage, so I never knew my blood father or birth mother. I was fortunate later to have a kind adoptive blue-color father come into my life, who did his best by me — though the household in which I was raised was insanely dysfunctional, the result of his wife, who belittled me in private throughout my childhood, even into my early adult life, and her abusive paranoid-schizophrenic mother… with all love rightly due the father who adopted and cared for me, I still always wondered what my early life would have been like, and who I’d be today, if I’d been raised and mentored by my blood father… but I have done my best to fill the emptiness those years left in me by pouring myself and my love into the children, and the wife, with whom I’ve been blessed…