Too Bad

Too bad you met me when I was small-hearted and spiteful

And not as I am now, known for my generosity,

Someone who’d never utter the hurtful phrases

Uttered in an earlier era by a man I admit identical

To me in name and in DNA but in nothing else.

Yes, the path from his consciousness

To my own is continuous, but marked by so many changes

In landscape and climate as it winds from a valley floor

Through lowland meadows to mountain freshets

It ought to be thought of as many paths, not one.

Not to answer my letters now seems like blaming a grandson

Bent on reform for the crimes of his granddad.

Isn’t it time to turn to the new law

That asks the past to bury itself while the present

Sets sail at sunrise, off to a newfound land?

Do you think I’ll tell the natives I happen upon

That they’re squatting on land I can prove is mine?

Maybe the man you remember would say such things,

But not the man who’s written you all the apologies

I’ve written since then, which you’ve answered with silence.

If you merely wanted to be left alone,

You’d have written back once to tell me so.

Silence with you, I’m sorry to say, seems a strategy,

A Siren call to lure me into the past

And leave me lost among reefs and ice floes.

How often must I explain that it isn’t working,

How often write you in a voice civil and patient,

Which only you won’t accept as mine?