Smoke Signals

How do we forgive our fathers, maybe in a dream?
Do we forgive our fathers for leaving us to often, or forever, when we were little?
Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage, or making us nervous, because there never seemed to be any rage there at all.
Do we forgive our fathers for marrying, or not marrying our mothers, for divorcing, or not divorcing our mothers?
And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness?
Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning, for shutting doors, for speaking through walls, or never speaking, or never being silent?

Do we forgive our fathers in our age or in theirs?
Or in their deaths, saying it to them, or not saying it?
If we forgive our fathers what is left?

-Smoke Signals (1998)

Poem from 2001

Anonymous Smile

Sometimes I cry

For you

I never got to know

You touched my life

Through a friendly face down the block

At a time when nobody would

Through a smile

Through a peek at the baby

In my stroller

By a wave to my kids

And by imitating Donald Duck

And then on a cruel day

I saw people carry a coffin

Into your tiny appartment

You were gone

Those days when we moved away

You suffered through hell

And I never took the chance

To invite you

In my home

And in my heart

P.K.

For a New Beginning

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life's desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

~ John O'Donohue ~