Living ..

Living Legacy

Shifting from one place to another like a movie changing its scenes

The dusty, warm trail that led to your home

You walked away from it and landed in this sometimes freezing tomb

Sometimes burning furnace

The weather always changes but you are here

Far from the dusty, warm trail that led to home

(A quiet man of physique, denied a simpler fate)

Where do you go? Where should you start?

Anyone else would have turned around and hid

Hid back at home where it was safe, where they belonged

Yet you moved forward as if you were charging through a hurricane

The winds pushed you, you pushed back

And in the end, you walked out of that storm

Without a stain

(And his heart was known to none)

You built your life in this strange world

Learned what you couldn't learn at home

You did nothing but learn

As the sun went down and sugar-white snow rested

Upon the windowpane

Becoming the example that hard work and struggle

Eventually paid you back

(And he gave to me a gift I know I never can repay)

I look at myself in that mirror everyday

I only see me, nothing special and nothing extraordinary

Yet I'm your offspring

The child of someone great and unknown

Who has failed to be as wonderful and bright as the man you were

Drowning, drowning, drowning

In a sea of misery, which is all my hard work paid me

I can not breathe and sometimes I want curl up

Curl up and fade into the darkness

(He earned his love through discipline)

I want to go into eternity where I will find you

Sometimes, I get tired of living

I pretend I am you though the world knows I'm fooling myself

But how else can I be like you?

I'm nothing more than your offspring

Swirled up in confusion, wanting answers

Something you have never faced with

I step up and slip back down

Cause I try so hard to become

Someone I will never see again

(My life has been a poor attempt

To imitate the man)

I was never there when you left your home so long ago

I never saw you walk down that dusty, warm trail

I was proud, I never witnessed it but I was proud of you

There was no other way I could talk about how great you were

How great you could have been

And all the wonderful things you will never be

So instead of wishing for the night to fall over me like a veil

I write of you.

I write what I remember and what I will never see

It's my only way of preserving your memories

It's the only way everyone else will know

The person behind the poet and every poem that poet wrote

They aren't the best but they are a start

(I thank you for the kindness

And the times when you got tough

And Papa, I don't think I said

"I love you" near enough)

And maybe, one day, the whole world will understand this poem

One way or another, I will show them

That the real superstar of our family's drama

Was you

(I am the living legacy

To the leader of the band)

~ Carter Tachikawa ~

Back

Kavitanjali