It’s Day 10 of NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo 2017.  The challenge for today is to “write a poem that is a portrait of someone important to you”.  In a slight twist, my offering is about being important to someone else.  To be precise, two somebodies who are more important to me than life.

Daddy
by Michael Romani

It isn't some sort of heresy
That the code of Bushido requires mercy
But there are limits to even this
When the nightmares linger into morning
There is something more than amiss
As the rolling thunder brings its mourning

There is peace within the coffin
Or, at least that's what I'm told
Yet, you stand there silently scoffing
Scouring my soul, feeling so bold
In a passing of raging calculus
Shattering the bond between the two of us

Memories haunt like a hungry ghost neglected
Struggling vitality of passions reflected
Gathered in the storms of starting over
Gathered in the ruins of this thing over
Going for my jugular, lost in your grief
The danger of your anger spills beyond belief

You worship wicked style over substance
If your lack of reason is any evidence
Chattering like a monkey in its execution
While I surrender rather than giving contribution
Two princesses are the price of my compromise
A price I pay in seeming surrender before your eyes

Beat and battered like a sad, bloody monk
You have never realized the worthlessness of material junk
The cost of their protection is to start again
Forced to my knees on shards of glass, I whisper amen
Smiling as you crow victory thinking that I have lost
While all I focus on are two princesses worth any cost

What does it matter if my old world burns down
Or, if you think I wear the jester's thorny crown
Some things are worth everything to a soul such as mine
While losing all else burns but also serves to refine
If in the end, my two girls know who to trust
I will have done, only what I must -

Daddy.....
... It's my name
and
It means something...

(c) April 10, 2017 Michael Romani