Daddy yelled at me - "Stop crying, and take it like a man!!" - and I shriveled up into myself, being a baby again. I tried to think of all the happy things we had done before that - Daddy let me watch him play WOW, and he played a board game with me, for the first time since I had met him! - and there were a couple, but it was hard not to feel the pain, and to not cry... Eventually, though, I learned to stop; when Daddy told me to pull my pants down, and bend over the edge of the bed for a spanking, I did it shakily, but I did not cry, even if Daddy hit me with a belt. I 'took it like a man', but it seemed Daddy did not like that, even though that is what he had told me to do. He yelled again - "I might as well spank you double, since it doesn't seem to bother you!!" - but I did not cry. This made Daddy stop eventually, but when Daddy turned into Father, I wished I could get the physicality back. The shaming, and yelling, and screaming, and fighting was so much worse - it made me want to die. When I told father this, he only did it more; so I tried to die. Then he left me on my own, ashamed of me; from then on, I wrote until my fingers callused, and drew until my hand cramped, to have a world of my own, where nobody was shamed for wanting to cry, or end their lives.

Picture portraits in a small photo,
generations on a great hall's walls.
Prominent people of the past,
lives emptied out in a room now empty,
but still present in its patinated patterns.

Like pretend gods they covet their ill-gotten goods,
while the room fills with artisan phantoms,
championing their creative crafts,
charming the furnishings they fashioned.
Their lives survive only in their works,
some unattributed, unfamed but unshamed.

I was once something
more.
A man, vibrant in heart
Passion.
Unremarkable tho
genuine
    gentleman,
Maybe not so
gentle.
Red in tooth and
claw.
Strong enough to
give,
As good
As I got.
Until
Invisible harm
Undid this
charm.
day by day
Turning
grey.
Until nothing remained
left unshamed.
of me.
Now I'm just a shadow
At each feast,
Little left of man
Just beast.
Nothing left to love
at least.
Invisible.
Unseen.
Bleeding out.
Without
a doubt.

"O'er the dark pines she sees the silver moon,
   And in the west, all tremulous, a star;
And soothing sweet she hears the mellow tune
   Of cow-bells jangled in the fields afar.

Quite listless, for her daily stent is done,
   She stands, sad exile, at her rose-wreathed
           door,
And sends her love eternal with the sun
   That goes to gild the land she'll see no more.

The grave, gaunt pines imprison her sad gaze,
   All still the sky and darkling drearily;
She feels the chilly breath of dear, dead days
   Come sifting through the alders eerily.

Oh, how the roses riot in their bloom!
   The curtains stir as with an ancient pain;
Her old piano gleams from out the gloom
   And waits and waits her tender touch in vain.

But now her hands like moonlight brush the keys
   With velvet grace -- melodious delight;
And now a sad refrain from over seas
   Goes sobbing on the ***** of the night;

And now she sings.    (O! singer in the gloom,
   Voicing a sorrow we can ne'er express,
Here in the Farness where we few have room
   Unshamed to show our love and tenderness,

Our hearts will echo, till they beat no more,
   That song of sadness and of motherland;
And, stretched in deathless love to England's
            shore,
   Some day she'll hearken and she'll under-
       stand.)

A prima-donna in the shining past,
   But now a mother growing old and gray,
She thinks of how she held a people fast
   In thrall, and gleaned the triumphs of a day.

She sees a sea of faces like a dream;
   She sees herself a queen of song once more;
She sees lips part in rapture, eyes agleam;
   She sings as never once she sang before.

She sings a wild, sweet song that throbs with
             pain,
   The added pain of life that transcends art --
A song of home, a deep, celestial strain,
   The glorious swan-song of a dying heart.

A lame ***** comes along the railway track,
   A grizzled dog whose day is nearly done;
He passes, pauses, then comes slowly back
   And listens there -- an audience of one.

She sings -- her golden voice is passion-fraught,
   As when she charmed a thousand eager ears;
He listens trembling, and she knows it not,
   And down his hollow cheeks roll bitter tears.

She ceases and is still, as if to pray;
   There is no sound, the stars are all alight --
Only a wretch who stumbles on his way,
   Only a vagrant sobbing in the night."

The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses - Robert W. Service - 1907

Let it be the Mountain she finds Holy—
not because it sparkles,
seduces her
or speaks in riddles,

but because its dark loamy soil
receives her bare feet like a memory.

A prairie hill above the sea,
where grasses bow and whisper,
and the wind carries the salt and scent of things
too old for names—
that’s where the house stands.
Not built from stone,
but from time.
And longing.

And the laughter of those
who once remembered Eden.

Let her dig down,
as if the roots of a wildflower
were waiting to rise through her skin,
lifting her slowly from within—
the stem, the pistil,
the fragile yet indestructible bloom.
Let the soil speak to her in silence,
saying:

You are still loved.
You are still alive.
You are not what happened to you.

Let her turn toward the sun—
not in shame,
but in radiant defiance—
and know in that moment
where her help truly comes from.

Let her running to the mountain
be joy, not dread.
Let her ascent be not an exile,
but a return.

Let her wings unfold brazenly,
as the daughter of the living God.
Not tucked.
Not hidden.
Not compromised.

She does not belong to the mountain that mocks love
and feeds on the ruin of hearts,
or exploits that which is still unhealed

She belongs here—
where her own flesh and bone
become not only family
but friend,
through the common bond
of the soil that gives life to all who dare to sink into it.

She belongs
where peace lives in warm light on cold nights,
where cotton sheets smell of soap and skin,
and starlight sifts through trees
like the hush of forgiveness.

Let her remember her first love..
before the theft,
before the theater.
Before the wound.

Let her toes remember
what it was to wiggle in the dirt
of something unbroken,
unshamed,
true.

Let her find home again—
not in a place carved out for her,
but in the space she reclaims
with her own rootedness.

Let her petals unfold slowly in the sun—
but only with her feet deep in the mountain's soil,
where others also have planted their lives,
becoming one
in harmony of breath and memory and Grace.

She will not enter into a sepulcher
or a place that makes usury of her pain.
She will stand on the mount before the rising sun—
alone if she must,
but never abandoned.

And somewhere in the hush between
the breeze and the soil,
she may yet feel

the quiet echo
of someone still with her.