Possible lives
New minds writing life,
twist innocence in folds of
gnarled memories.
This picture is from my dad’s side of the family. The way my father tells it, this child ended up working for the “Irish Mafia.” As a mind twisted by brutal life experiences, he walked into a bar my dad was sitting in (I have no idea why, where or when), shot a man and threw the gun in my father’s lap afterwards.
There were enough witnesses to testify that my father didn’t do it.
I was thinking of the possibilities (Who could this child have been?) as I wrote the haiku.
Great haiku! I think about this often. I wonder how many lost children might have had the cure for cancer in their heads if life had taken a different turn for them.
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Absolutely! My paternal grandfather worked as a bricklayer all week but imbibed all weekend. My dad described him as a “mean drunk” who would often chase his children out of the house to spend the night out there. So my dad, his 2 brothers and his sister spent the night in the trees listening to the panthers roar. This was long before South Florida was one giant city and there really were forests there. That’s one of the tamer stories he had about his childhood.
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Thank you for sharing this haiku about a tragic story.
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Children deserve better from us. Their mother died in the 1918 flu epidemic. She was pregnant when she died. The children who lived were 8, 6, 4, and 2. The oldest 2 turned out to be decent, honest people. The 2 younger ones lost their conscience, possibly because they didn’t have their mother’s influence for the first 5 years of life and only knew their father’s pain.
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Great haiku. In the light of the recent loss of a friend it made me think in an entirely different direction. I’ve been reading the comments on his obit page and learning a lot about he kind of person he was through the eyes and memories of others. I saw a different side of him, away from school, job, business and family…and yet, the personality looking out of the photo is the same.
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You and I both know of families who had 2 or more children where they’re both raised the same, yet one may be introspective and secretive, the other extroverted and boisterous.
A child has a basic personality, but how the personality is molded by environment can be frightening. The person you speak of had the mind of a genius and the personality that never seemed to make it out of childhood. I don’t know if that’s a bad or a good thing. 🙂
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Does that mean there’s a bit of a ‘mafiosa’ in you? 😀
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Dark and light reside in this vessel of a body and continually fight for survival. 🙂
It’s so very, very hard to be a consistent parent, and we all make mistakes, but in the bell curve of parenting, my paternal grandfather was in the lower 20% of humanity.
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