When I met my brother we had a conversation about the other side of the family I know more through photographs than memory, which includes my mother.

He said, "It was always Sarah and Paul was never mentioned".

It was the reinforcement of a truth my Dad said to be a long time ago though that I was rejected at birth and here was a snippet of the other side of the coin. Another piece of evidence.

Time is never a good healer and truth by it very nature is brutal and uncompromising but must be faced to be dealt with. The meeting opened old wounds I thought had long been sealed to be raw again and it has taken me a week to be able to collect my thoughts to express.

Not that I regret meeting my brother, not for one second, children are always caught in the crossfire; we cannot choose our parents or how life works out. Now as men we do not have to live by the past but rather explore the future and try and make up lost time.

White Silhouette

A mantle of three
placed by name in golden frames
she polishes,
rolls the pictures from her tongue,
pulls her first born girl from obscurity
across the miles of the city
to place her face at the dinner table
while she aborts her first born son
in a shroud of omission
and cuts flesh and bone
to a silent white silhouette.