Twenty-Five

There's a twenty-five-year-old lump in my throat,
A clog in my tear ducts.
And while there's something that doesn't love a wall,
No ground swell has toppled the invisible bulwark
Nor relieved the sleepless sentinels of their duty,
Which is this:
To keep captive pain,
To retain misery,
To hoard hurt like Jews in a Warsaw ghetto,
With no food nor clothing,
No warm fire nor hot soup,
No embrace nor hello,
Just twenty-five years of prisoners,
Trapped by consciousness,
Heaped upon with fresh table scraps of injury,
And at the bottom,
Dirt from which weeds of new experience grow,
Fed by stale memory repressed.