Memoir of a life 

 

 

Life writes itself on my body, in grooves carved so deep

the surface remains bruised and tender for decades.

This old frame is a mundane bible of an ordinary life,

with frayed edges, cracked spine of hand-crafted texts,

beginning in gothic script leading into common type.

 

Memories etch stooped shoulder blades with fine line drawings

so graceful they hang in life’s art gallery, Stretch-marks blaze

across on my tummy from each birth and death.

Staunch ribs catalog history where I belonged without direction,

written in formless stanzas, punctuated by children and time.

 

My love’s crossing the delicate border of death was the blade

that razored my heart in two; my own hand cleaved another fissure

along my arm bones and hammered in scars of loss of other loves.

Grave marker typeface hides in the shadows of my chest

behind my overtaxed lungs, waiting for when it is my time.

 

No matter where my heady, sometimes cocky steps

have landed, I leave memory stained foot prints

in the direction of my life on the long way home alone.

​

 

 

Sharon Lopez Mooney, Memoir of a life, from “Door is A Jar”, Spring Issue #22, ed. Corinne Alice Nulton, New York 2022