Welcome to the panels of my collection.
Where dust cannot gather on the pages, but the pages turn all the same with your memories and those of others left behind.
You’ve made the cut from me with the full reckoning force of your inherent ferocity.
I often wonder of your bellicose nature. Did it come to you by way of your ancient nordic bloodlines? Did the captors of your youth—those who ridiculed or tried to reshape the lens through which you see the world—awaken the coding of your genes?
Remember the day you took me to your childhood home? I looked out and saw a peaceful, green field, with a creek running alongside her. Did those thieves and their cruelty condemn the way you drew on the security of all that you ever knew? Did the disruption of her serenity lead you to seek out battlefields in which you learned to fight?
As a man, did the sorrows you faced as a rejected husband, lover, and protector bring you to a girl with a shadowed heart? Were you intoxicated by the way she moved—like a silk ribbon gracefully floating in air—defying gravity? Yet when you tried to hold it you found it wasn’t intended for grounding.
I pictured the boy you once described on the day you took me to your field. In that place, I felt the safety of the land and the water you once knew.
And it was there that I saw a wounded buck with blood-stained, rust-colored fur. His broken antlers forming points of sharp weapons.
His restless pace was unsure and he contemplated whether leading me down to the banks of the stream was worth leaving the solace and healing of his field.
Reaching out my hand to him, I made too quick of a movement. And with the stealth of his inner fighter, he turned away leaving me on the other side of what feels like an ocean.
And as my heart breaks, I drop down to my knees, tears falling into the creek that guards his heart. Forever unknowing if they can be welcomed as an offering of my love.
Poetry Collections by Nora J. Coker 