Secrets

After Daddy died, Mama seemed lost and
the house was filled with whispers.
She and Grandma used to sit close together
at the kitchen table, holding hands
and talking in hushed tones.
They had many secrets but would stop talking
when they noticed me standing in the doorway.
That’s how I learned a lot of things
I wasn’t supposed to know,
like how he died.

As husbands came and went,
we moved around from state to state.
I was always the new girl in school
so I learned how to make friends fast
and how to say goodbye,
although there was often no time for that,
just time to grab our things, run for the train,
get our seats and watch out the window
as the towns and countryside
flashed past, including cows.

At night, my little brother and I slept in a bunk
up above our seats.
The Pullman Porter would fix us up
and we’d pretend to go to sleep
but as soon as everyone was quiet,
we’d sneak down and run up and down the aisles
until Mama put a stop to that.

It wasn’t until I was eighteen
that one of those secrets between Mama and
my Grandma popped right up in my head
to change forever who I thought I was.
And I’d known it all the time.

Barbara Wolf (2006)

['Secrets', according to Barbara Wolf, "tells the tory of how the death of a father is experienced by his daughter immediately after the event and as it plays out many years later. I have left it to the reader to determine what the secrets might have been." The above poem has been paired by the poet with our first introduction to her, 'The Ritual', which has also been called, "As a Child".
-RocksWorks]