Inheritance

Generational

I. FATHER

The Replay

The strength of the arm of a man
cursed with an endless replay:
his son’s voice, crying from the edge of a sloop
as the calm tides rise,
and the tone of conversation turns,
commanded by the ocean,
a captain: passive, aggressive,
simmering with ferocity beneath its stillness.

The Unveiling

His shame is unwrapped
in the same breath his ego is stripped and drowned,
laid at the mercy of the divine.
Through thunder and storm
the undoing of a man.

The Witness

All of it on display,
framed in the windowsill of the past.
And the world watches, amused,
as if it were all a play,
scripted for Broadway,
staged in cities where no one remembers his name.

The child, now part of the tide,
left with the right arm of the man
who sits at the edge of the dock,
soaked in a memory
once lived.



II. MOTHER

The Ocean

I hold the ocean in my mind.
Blues merging with blues,
storms building,
whirling inside the layers of my mind.

In years,
it became the status of my being:
to be a woman of Duty
feeding from the waves of my mind.

A king who arrived when I laughed through spaced teeth,
and stayed
through baggy sleeves and birthdays
counted in dread.

At nineteen, he whispered.
At twenty, he kissed me on the teeth.
By twenty-five, he sat proud
legs wide,
smirking from the centre of my ribcage.

Resentment came soon after,
dragging her chair beside him.
By twenty-six, I was coloured by hate.
but still,
I answered his name.

“Duty,” the neighbours called.
“Duty,” my suitors echoed.
“Duty,” said my womb,
unborn, unheard.

I wore silence like a sash.
Poised.
Cracking.
A junkyard for everyone I loved.

At thirty, too young to rot,
too old to bloom,
I carried him still,
his weight woven into my skin.

Each time I sighed,
he carved a grin from the paste of his liver—
so wide it coloured me grim.

But I was only a flailing thing,
a slip of a girl
with the universe cupped in her palms.



III. DAUGHTER

The Fawn

Each crevice on his face etched in grey fury
“How dare?” his shouts imbue her.
His eyes defy his duty,
Her father, grizzly.

“Sit!”
   Tears
“More!”
      Tears

She’s lying in an ocean of her own
enough to drown the civil ant mound.

Now she speaks with the sound of none:
“I wish I was never one.”
Panicked,
she’s still what was left
of 12 and a half.

A body in fear of his rustic sneers,
her ears and eyes morph into deer.

“Why aren’t we near?”

Because
no fawn can win in front of the bear.



IV. SON

Shrouded

Once upon a time,
dreams were made of silver rocks.

Horses clasped the hands of men that rode,
tales and sing-songs of clashing armour,
metals that held fates
espoused, then slain.

As years went by,
edges of my dreams crisped black
like a cigar, exhausted
in the mouth of an idle bourgeois.

Fire stamped the pages of life
until I was left with nothing but ash—

Washed away from the bottom of the trough,
were the remnants,
alive,
igniting the thread of my garb
to dust.

I stood,
pure as a babe.

Stripped and bare,
no dreams to wear,

in the middle of winter,
in the middle of a sea,
without a lair.

Blood in my veins,
frozen and blue.

So I lay on dry wood,
clutching to shaky ground,
begging to merge

like time,
when we were one.

But it turned me away
and left me in shame.

Then, after a day,
it cradled me in its waves.

That night,
I dreamt of a father’s right hand
cupping my heart,
layered in warmth,
shrouding the cracks
that mapped my build.

After a long break, I felt it would only be right to come back with an even longer poem. Hope you enjoy x