Beloved Son
They wrote the words Beloved Son so large on my gravestone that they eclipsed my own name. Perhaps it is easier to pour grief into such a title, when a life is taken too soon. I wonder sometimes if I would have made different choices that day – swallowed first by drink, then by the water, and now by the grave. I was but a young man drunk on his own youth and feeling the invincibility of it. Among friends, on the lake, in the dark – then pulled down by all of it. Now I stare from my vantage in the grassy field of sectioned real estate with a thick gathering of gravestones behind me and a scattered few of them in front of me – overlooking, across the narrow country road, the home of my youth. The home where my parents still reside….
looking out each morning at the son who has died.
NOTE: This poem is inspired by the NaPoWriMo.net prompt for Day #8 – read a few of the poems from Spoon River Anthology, and then write your own poem in the form of a monologue delivered by someone who is dead. When I was in high school we lost a couple of upper classmen to a drowning incident on the lake. This is a small ode to one of those young people. I chose not to include names as they are not mine to share.
S.T. Marie 