(Dedicated to every parent who has lost a child.)

Shards
      By JoHannah P. Green

In a moment it was over.
In a moment the fragile glass,
which held us, heart to heart,
was shattered.
The delicate thread,
that seemed so strong
and tied our lives together,
unraveled.
Now
hard as I try
I cannot seem to avoid
the shards of glass -
the splinters of memory -
that litter the corridors
of my heart.

I try to sweep them up,
to brush them away,
but every move
finds a new sliver
driving deep into tender flesh.
I step carefully,
but every footfall
jars loose another memory.
Each clock tick
sets in motion
a cascade of crystalline needles
that pierce so deeply
I feel I cannot breath.

Some days I reach into the core
where all the broken bits
have been swept into a corner,
into a tidy pile.
I seize the sharpest piece
and cruelly drag it
across my sorely wounded heart.
As if
my sorrow is not deep enough,
I must add to it my guilt
-for all the words unfairly uttered,
-for all the slights intended and not,
-for everything I did not say or do
before the last moment
-I saw you,
-heard your voice,
- touched your hand.

They are wrong
who say, "Time heals all wounds."
The deepest wounds never heal.
We just find a way
to seal them off
in the rooms of memory
in which
the sharpest,
most precious shards remain
with us always.