An Effigy

First there was a sequel now a third! A month of trilogies–the pain, the hurt, and the loss. The credits named three obituaries, another one joins the ranks of those two lost. Still I expected its coming, though I knew not the face, for God always works in cruel wonders when he decides to greet us with his grace.

Poor James, both lost and confused! How I imagine your eyes rolled back as that last breath left your lips? Forty-one years was all your heart could permit, and I did not even give you a send off for your one-way trip. Four daughters who have yet to see eighteen years of moons, their protector, breathless, that’s how they found you in your room!

Always you go in waves, a trilogy of litanies, my dearly departed loved ones to be laid in their graves. I felt it coming when the first one fell, the reason and rhyme whispered both in heaven and hell. Three gone again, three for each day they said your son was bound in death, unchained he rose, but my faithless eyes roll wet.

A cursing to the heavens at cruel irony, a universal symphony played in spite of human fate. They said man is born to trouble, but I think Job missed an opportune date. The number twenty two, forged like ink in my heart, the sacred link to my family near and far. What if this is what was meant, bound to the reaper’s chains, that sacred and binding number, was foretelling a year of pain?

I still did not tell you, oh sacred ear that opens its heart. James’s young brother, he died this year near the Ides of March. Ceasarless, Joe died without his crown, a life brutally ended as do wheels roll across the ground. My uncle lost two sons, two boys in the same year, and still he bends the knee to a god in awe and fear.

Sinner be damned and the blessed are cursed, a god of wisdom and truth, what is such a god worth? Banished from your heavens, and forsaken of your grace, a god of omnipotence, his world festers and lays to waste. Such like a father, a man begotten of righteous thought, forsaken our earth mother, the war was lost before the start.

Here burns another Effigy and I recite another beloved name; in the quiet of my silence the feeling feels the same. A burning resentment, like a kettle boiling black! A tremor to the iron will, i feel like porcelain that cracks. Mortality all around me, blazing fire falls like rains, a mind is befuddled by the ones destiny claims.

And the burns that scald and tinge to the touch, they pry at old memories that bleed with a rush. In childhood you were a giant, an older legend in my head, and now I pay you homage instead of breaking with you bread! James the young lion, realized what fate portends, Adieu to my cousin, farewell too old friend!