#ishtarsreturn

The Dead Dad Club by Dana Gabrielle Espinosa

You can find prints of this drawing here: ishtarsreturn.bigcartel.com

*~*~*

I only started processing my dad’s death

11 years after the fact,

I can’t explain why exactly, your brain sort of

goes into this

subterranean state in childhood, submerging

itself beneath the trauma,

buried in the heaviness of the memories

in your head, like a rotting sunken shipwreck,

and

as you get old, you let the flora overgrow,

hope in vain that the pain will let you go if

you just forget it in the depths.

If I simply forgot the sound of

his ghost’s clear voice in my room one night,

or the blowing of his silver whistling,

cleansing our home from beyond the grave,

unbeknownst to us all,

I thought if I told him to just go away,

stop speaking so loudly in his death, that

the wound of it would heal, imperceptible,

not even a scar,

to the human eye,

and I could be normal and hide--

Normal,

meaning, not connected to

what can’t be seen,

not accompanied by a phantasmal protector,

not shrouded in his pearlescent veil, safe from

unseen harms all around,

not purposefully isolated from the ordinary and

the bound.

It took me 11 years to learn this was less of a

hindrance,

and more of a gift, a sacred perspective,

an archetypal membership,

a bridge between forgotten worlds in

this waking Hell.

I speak freely with him now,

acknowledge what he does for me when it

comes around,

witness his secret messages, like,

a colorful moth perched just in my view,

a snowstorm erupting at his grave in the

evening,

a sunny glittering of his face in the rearview

as I’m driving.

I learned to reply to him in his symbolic

language too, that is new,

an abandoned tongue, long repressed,

now expressed,

with my own rituals and lore;

light a candle in the night,

write a poem by its flickering light,

dance and get the heart pumping,

then, quickly now, begin the drumming,

while the sky breaks out into triumphant

trumpeting.

~ * ~ * ~