Childhood's Not-So-Empty Lot

Through my eyes
she watches
children
watching videos
connecting through facebook
staccatoed texting and typing
information overload
until she swirls in memories
of her own childhood
beckoning from the light behind my vision:
kick the can
flag-football
empty-lot baseball games
with the boys
all that energy
to be released and inhaled by
her whose brother
(at first protector and guide)
entered doctor's offices
hospitals
and finally
left her for
some unknown
up-there-in-the-sky place
for ten-year-olds,
fogging her five-year-old mind
because there was
no service, no wooden box
slipping slowly into some
gaping earthen crater,
no burnt offering
created from a body left by the soul...

And still,
sometimes,
she senses him
cutting through her own
information overload
(staccato childhood chatter
nursery rhymes repeating
in her mind):
a messenger rising up from the void
releasing pain and anger
breathing in her broken heart
fluttering those
torn paper wings:
an unseen angel
hovering
alive.