The Exile
We could have given him
a bed to sleep on,
warmed those hands always cold.
He could have grown,
playing with our daughters,
learnt a resting silence
under our aging sycamore.
With time he could have been
with its calm strength imbued.
We would have loved him as our own.
Our daughters would have been his sisters.
They would have sheltered him,
with soft hands over his eyes,
till he could shelter them
with hard shoulders
from the eyes of the city's men.
But he wanted no shelter
but that of the burning sky
under which his mother died
under which her old haunts were
an angry haze
turning in upon themselves.
Noiseless, he crawled
between the crumbling houses,
dodging the falling dreams,
home only in the dark places
where his mother's silence had survived.
She was the preciousness of her silence,
its shyest midnight gleam.
But we thought her silence covered her
like a diseased leper's filth.
We had sought to banish it.
We had banished her instead.
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