Kathleen, Queen of the Desert

Originally published in LLL of New Mexico’s Enchantment, Winter 1986

I didn’t know about him for a long time.
It had been an afternoon–an ordinary summer afternoon,
August 9, 1963;
I was home in the kitchen,
My mom was chopping something.
Patrick Kennedy had just died,
The President’s little baby boy,
I told my mother it made me sad.
She stopped.

In a soft voice,
A small, tight voice I’d never heard before,
Very, very far away,
She said, “That happened to me, too.”
Time stopped.

I stared at my mother,
This strange woman in my house,
Not just my mother anymore.
“He lived half an hour.”
My throat turned hard and dry;
“We named him after my father.”

He was gone forever,
I never said goodbye.
She had kept the hurt to herself all those years.

Now I have two babies
Perfect and alive;
And I think about that little brother,
A part of me,
Gone.
And I’m still trying to saying goodbye.