Tears that fell, salt to the earth
These several years past
And still I can’t recall quite…
When did he die? Pass on?
When did I kill him,
My older brother who is younger than I.
I have to find the paper and I sigh,
“Oh yes, that’s right, I remember…
I remember.” Wash, rinse, repeat.

Daddy says some of us,
We just set with death,
Hold hands through the dying,
Pat brows with warm wet clothes
Coo inarticulate soothings to deaf ears.
Some of us, we just deal in silence soft
with tears that fall, salt to the earth.

I look about at the growing, the change,
How did I come to this place? Come to me?
Was it spring that I first stepped foot
along this path or was it fall?
Or was it that one March when
the morphine drip
drip
drip, haunted, that March when
I buried one too young too angry,
Tears falling, salt to the earth
As I patted them from his hollow cheeks,
Licked them from my own lips gone dry.