Episode 33: When the Headlights come on
Hi everyone, I hope you’re doing as well as you can be today. This week’s poem and episode bring us alongside someone who didn’t know how to help a struggling parent/guardian who offered abundant love, imagination, and play while they were alive. Eventually, the narrator realizes that these gifts—creativity, play, imagination, and love—from their parent/guardian are the very tools they can use to create and offer support, and even though they can’t ‘save’ their parent/guardian, they may be able to help others like them.
I’ll share it with you now:
I knew what I needed
to do the moment
the headlights came on,
after which,
it gets to be
later & later—
bluer & bluer—
reminding me that
all windows close &
this one especially fast.
What we care about
most deeply
appears
in the sketches we drew
without looking
at the page,
as if the rehearsal
in a dream
or of a death.
So, tears a steady stream, softening
the high beams & brake lights,
I will start walking tonight
as a creative practice—
right when headlights click on—
because one cannot look
at the page while walking.
This may be the only way
to love a parent or guardian who
only ever loved & adored you—
played upon pages
neither of you ever peeked at—
but perishes because
the world so bruised them
but they never let you see
the broken bones beneath.
I grit my teeth with the blessing
to be gifted or gene-granted or God-given
their imagination
so that one day, on
one of these evenings,
I may be able to save them
as in we are
made of each other
and therefore
made for one another.
Breathe the words in. What do they make you feel or think? How did they connect with your senses? What colours or symbols did you notice? What meaning did you draw? Metaphors? Interpretations? Clarity? Messages?
