Poetry history love and shame

What of the stories and the poetry

Once when love was young, one child he had.
This then one young child.

He wanted her to know the stories,
the ones that made, him and her and them.

He prepared the journals, the ones he kept
and honored and adored.

He copied and typed and edited,
with plenty of footnotes, like he had learned in school.

As he read and reread them he feared them.
There was no love there, between the pages, of the journals.

He had spent so many years learning to love and to live and to forgive.
One hundred years from now the grandchildren would read,
the carefully crafted, and footnoted and spelling checked journals,
where love was not noted within?

He put them carefully away for another day.

Twenty years later cancer came back, like a raging storm.
She had promised him that it was not a big deal, she lied,
it was a big deal.

Six months, they had left, maybe less.
How then to live a life without her?

The gardener was busy, working in the garage, to find a solution.
He was working two jobs, to fund the solution.

He was filled with anger, and shame, and regret.
The gardener and his wife and children were enjoying a campfire.

Theirs was no longer a world of his, so then came the poem.

You see poetry was never a gift, he adored.
Yet you ask, what of John Milton, Carol Lynn Pearson, and Eugene England.
These then were the exception.

What then makes him see himself as a poet?

The pain and anger and guilt and shame must go somewhere.
The toxic levels of fear and regret,
these must go if only to survive another day, so the poem came.

At first, they were not good, he dared not share the guilt and shame.
Like puss from a great wound, it sprinkled forth, to release the pain.

You see poetry, like life, remains unfinished.
The story to be completed by the reader.
The love, the hate, the anger, the shame,
become a shared story with the reader.

No carefully crafted footnotes, no carefully researched and accurate history,
just the guilt and love and hate and shame splattered on the page.

One hundred years from now, when you read the stories, I hope you feel,
the love and adoration and lessons,
he learned, from the poetry.