Moon at Half Past Noon

Tell me, did the father and the son escape,
and leave the ghost to weep?
Or did they, in their flight, instead,
a vow of mourning swear to keep?

They did not leave it in the field,
that phantom of their pain.
They carried it between them like a shield
against all healing weather.

They built a house to hold its sound,
a language for its sigh.
They gave it ground, they gave it ground,
beneath a loyal sky.

They polished it with telling,
until it shone—a corrupted piece of truth,
A weapon and a dwelling, a poisoned heirloom
for the weary and the youth.

Why does the scar feel safer than the skin?
Why is the known hell better than the unknown grace?
This wound we are swaddled in, is it original sin?
Or just a familiar, a **cherished **place?

For to lay down the grief would be to lose the name,
To be a tribe with neither story, nor a foe.
To kill the ancient, righteous, feeding flame,
And have no compass left to show us where to go.

So the ghost does not weep. It is fed. It is fed
on the salt of our tears and the wine of our dread.
It grows strong on the silence we mistake for respect.
On the histories we curate, the truths we suspect.

It points a translucent finger, a demand in its stare,
for a payment of blood, to prove that we care.
The original injury was a single, sharp stone.
Now it’s a mountain of sorrow we call our own.

We are the father. We are the son.
The escape was a story we never begun.
For the ghost we chose to keep, we now cannot disown.
It has our voice. It has our face.
It sleeps in our home.