Lucky Cherry Seven

There once was a time
when I implored the bastions of earth,
those stalwarts of the heavens,
those watchers in the sky,
to look after me and those of my descent.
And each night with clenched eyes
and regret for those things I had done
which may have warranted their neglect,
I sought their protection with diligence.

I was a trusting man then, of faith and superstition.

For they had granted to me
safe passage earlier that year,
on my voyage eastward to west.
While caught in the fiercest of squalls,
I was thrown about on a deck full of deviates--
praying men, passionate men of God who knew none before.
But we were destined to wash into port alive,
fear-stricken and hungry, with contrition in our hearts.

And to my daughter, who in naïve longing
had found herself married to a madman--
a sickly man of sweat, of words and vile ways--
they showed compassion.
In a fit of rage one evening he assailed her,
and as she fled amid shards of porcelain,
he stumbled, inebriated, and took to the stairs,
flinging as a carnival wheel.
Rough at first,
and then empty and lifeless as a rolling barrel,
singing her freedom with his flesh against the floor.

And to my son, away at war, they granted pity
in atrocity's stead. He emerged unscathed
from the scalding remnants of strewn soil and bodies,
guarded by branches and rotting roots
in a small pit--dug of his own design
by cupped hands, small shovels of skin
rubbed raw by the coarseness of the earth.
He was Daniel in the den of lions,
recovered gracefully and sent home to me seven days later,
more a man than a lad.

But the story goes,
and I am now but a mere wisp of myself--
haunted, driven to madness by the ephemeral sound
of hoof against hardened soil.
For I had trusted in them,
they to whom I had given
that unwavering devotion of my soul
for proof against the cowardice of fate.

It was at the raceway that year, the first
Monday in July. My honored son had
returned to that passion of his--the horses--
and on lucky Cherry Seven he rode.
Such a wild spectacle to behold,
with he on the track and I in the thick of the crowd,
looking upon the event with glee and great cheer.

Until I watched in silence
as the second turn on four
became entangled with flank and body,
a mass of moving limbs.
In the clear of the track that ensued lay
one solitary soul: one broken, smiling body,
now again more a lad than a man,
crushed under the hateful premises of luck,
with the fortunes acquired in the midst of war
peeled back by the casual insistence of death.

I gave persistent devotion and they forsook me.
I gave of all of my nights and they offered spurious promises.
I found it within to believe and I was abandoned.

And so now--
Now I will abandon them.