Memory:vindicare(the best revenge)
No words hate me
Nostos algos, home is pain,
No, pain is home, and its skin thickens:
Baseball leather, roses
Poses, lightning, then
Summer bolts who always follow, then
the petrichor
in the curved pebbled driveway,
dotted with golf balls, Winged Feet cut grass, then
Dad backed into my orange steed.
Indeed, my Eames chair is still a hostage
of the Mistress of the mansion
who tossed books,
Synge’s poems, words unforgotten,
The Curse, to the Lord:
“Lord, confound this surly sister.”
Dad’s Navy Kodachromes, she
stole my memories, never gone.
Bullseye medals in gold,
muscle memory cannot defy
nor a little boy’s toys, pointed at my head:
“Kill all of you,” he said,
failed again.
No relief,
from the grief
or my adamantine memory,
my fort,
is buried deep,
seep that.
My star, my memory, my Ultima Thule,
No land of dreams,
safe in the harbor:
vindicare.
Still, I remember,
the Lady in Black’s words:
“do you have any friends?”
All words are mine, and saved, I say.
Not one hates me,
Nor I, them.
©Philippe du Col, 2025.