"but there's no hand
to take me home..."
Robert Lowell

Seeking my complicity,
a brother pleads
for familial tales of youth,
before the bite of apple
tasted like vinegar to his mouth.
I own no apple-cart,
can but offer him a vinegar-
tinged sponge. Life
serves up both sweet cider
and vinegar cocktails, I say.

Krishnamurti calls the family
a fraud fraught with shoulds
and must-dos. Cut
the bonds to be free, he says.
Does he mean cut
the cords of convention, or cut
the umbilical cord to family?
Should the family tree
be felled and limbed?

Family lives in the limb-
webbed mind with
the root that restricts
and the vine that entwines,
the trunk that yields
but to the hurricane wind.
A limb on the riverbank,
wrenched from the tree,
needs a hand to throw it
into life's flow,
a hand with the wisdom
to not take it home.

---

Geordie de Boer has "been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king..." and received his MCP at the University of Oregon. His poetry can be sampled at Frostwriting, Eclectica or Offcourse; Google him, why don't you?