One
Link In the Chain Broken
By Oscar S. Cisneros
One link in the chain broken. Before the next unravels,
I will have begun a new beginning, a clean break from
the past, a new start that those down the line will be
proud of. I did not ask for the past. I was born into
it.
There are things that I lament, the distance, the loss
of love between me and a man of my own blood, a man who
doted on me as a child, who once took me into his arms
when the weakest link showed its frailty. Across the generations,
that love I am thankful for and return unconditionally.
Those are the things I will cherish when I remember him.
But there it ends. It ends because I say it will end.
Because the past was not mine to choose, but the future
is mine to make. I choose this day as the day to mark
the start of a new tomorrow.
I leave behind the machismo, the willfulness, the inability
to bow down before others and God. I leave behind the
addiction, that addled affliction that creeps like razorvine
unheard unfelt until it and all its tangled mass cannot
be unraveled. I leave in the past the man of two volumes:
silent or shouting. I leave all of it behind, except the
honor and the gallantry, the sense of humility that makes
me at ease with both the beggar and the king, the dapper
laugh of my mother's father, the staid and true demeanor
of his father.
In time I will be the last link in this chain. But before
my times comes, I will leave the world and my family enlarged
by a few souls that are the best of the past and the best
of the future. It starts today.
