“I have my books and poetry to protect me.”
I had taped to the glass door of a secretariat
in my bedroom around 1966. I think it had
to do with Dad being gone so much being
an evangelist and leaving me and Mom
and her doing double duty as mother and father
when he was gone and how I resented a god
of love who took my father away and later
returned him full of cancer neither drugs
nor prayers could cure. I didn’t know the ways
of God as I would. After I went to college,
the words remained taped to the glass door.
The song, of course, I Am a Rock; the refrain,
I am a rock I am an island. And a rock feels
no pain/And an island never cries.
It took years before I took those words down.
-Byron Hoot
