I have a sister <br />in the shadows <br />- she is the spider in the corner. <br />I have a sister <br />whose blood fetters me, <br />ties me unwilling to her madness <br />her lies; <br />her house of shames and half-perceived <br />sleights of hand. <br />She has now re-written the past, <br />family history <br />twisted <br />through the kaleidoscope <br />of her madness. <br />We have acquired Jewish ancestry. <br />The kindly Jewess neighbour of our childhood <br />transmogrified <br />without her permission <br />into some distant, <br />holocaustic <br />relative. <br />My own Jewish friends <br />Offended <br />beyond words - bad enough she <br />hawks their collective pain <br />to produce some born again credentials. <br />Essentially, <br />she is a creeping <br />death. <br />Poison pen wielded in <br />self aggrandizement <br />doggerel offered <br />as a palliative to gentile minds <br />untroubled <br />by depth of understanding. <br />Our childhood reissued in gothic form <br />complete with a new province, <br />new vitae <br />in a new milieu, <br />part of our nation's conflict, <br />born in semtex <br />and raised by armalite; <br />inexplicable captions from events <br />grisly remains <br />behind golden altars <br />insulting the old <br />and the new, the very <br />marrow of our heritage <br />prostituted. <br />I read in disbelief, <br />fragments <br />that yield her delusions <br />read and disbelieve <br />and fear. <br />The truth is <br />a distant country <br />divorced from her now. <br />She has denied us <br />foresworn us <br />betrayed us. <br />We are the Tuatha and <br />she is now <br />Foreign. <br />My life has rooted <br />flowered in the essence <br />of my reality. <br />hers is withering on <br />a dead tree <br />hanging.<br /><br />Geraldine Moorkens Byrne<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/blood-fetters-history-erased/
