You were never much
for the soft word
or sentimental touch.
God alone knows
how you survived
those early years,
the unwanted hands
of the man who
should have fought off
the boys who would
maul you that way
many years later.
The elders blamed
you, a three year old
child, a seductress;
sent you and your
older sister off
to pervert another
tribe in Oklahoma,
and exiled your mother
for having the sheer
audacity
to raise a stink
about your treatment.
Small wonder you married
a white man;
smaller still the wonder
that he was white trash
and proud of it.
You told me once
that for all the bluster,
he was gentle with you,
and how you needed that.
Ambivalent
about love and ***,
you taught what you knew.
When you found the knife
your daughter kept
under her mattress
to fend off her
older brother's hands,
you taught what you didn't know.
You would be horrified
that the horrifics above
would be published;
after all, every family
has blood on their sheets
that should never be
laundered in public.
The droplets of blood
on your childhood sheets,
sequestered
for half a century
poisoned you,
and ate away
the delicate fabric of love
with which you bound
old wounds.
Your faith, your Truth
allowed no special days
save the day Christ died;
so today is just another day,
excellent and fair.
You forgave us our anger
without fully understanding
why we were angry;
it's taken years
and bitter lessons
to discover
what a difficult
gift that was to deliver.
The last memory of you:
You turned to me
as I pushed your wheelchair
along the sidewalk, and said,
I never thought it would be you, here.
One of my mother's favorite aphorisms was, "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar".