Shakira Sison

For Fourth

You disappeared one day.
You took your brilliant words
and perfectly timed guitar taps
and the ends of my sentences away.

And I haven’t heard back.
Meanwhile children have grown,
and more people have moved away.
Some have since returned
just to leave again
for even stranger lands.
Your mother’s found love is now failing
and your twin, too, is lost
in another world of lines.

Another brother has died.

Yet all the songs would not.
They still play from screens
and are sung as odes
to the legend that was our time,
the years passing like pages
turning our days into stories
whose reality seems only mine.

-Shakira Sison