From my poetry collection, "All the Words in Between"

 

I’m molding into a storyteller with age,

but not without listening to how my mother

watched the world shift and write chapters.

She was working in an office for Bell South,

praying after the Challenger incident;

home, hearing what they found

under Gacy’s house; raising

me while I was too young to know what

was happening in Waco

or Oklahoma

or other places that took over the 90’s.

 

She can,

I can’t remember many events without

iPhones and constant coverage to flood us

with the new panic before we could digest the last.

Emotions seemed much more innocent,

too raw before millennial buzz gave us

numb stares, attention deficits.

It was life like the way her father, a farmer dressed

in rough hands and a stoic mouth, told her

the gravity of Kennedy with tears.

 

But generations after the last seem to start

all over again. Decades later, I was in school

in September, alerted by stern voices

and breaking news on every channel.

 

Like her,

I was young–“what’s a terrorist attack?”

and other questions.

Like her,

I wasn’t pushed into a new era

until I found her clutching Kleenex

in the living room.

Like her,

I’m a wide-eyed witness, doomed to

pass around vivid images when wisdom sets.