You’re in an archetypal family drama
And like so many things it would be droll
If it weren’t the whole of your existence. Trauma
Now seventy years old takes and takes its toll:
You’ve had a long, productive life, of course,
But where were you in all of that? The fruit
You bore was not your own; it was brute force
Alone that had disguised you to the root
In someone else’s leaves. Now you become
You again, limb by limb. No doubt you’ve asked
Yourself what makes us who we are (the sum
Of what is done to us; quintessence masked
By histories of struggle that transform
By scarring? Or does something else inform

Identity—do each of us contain
Some fundamental grain of deeply buried,
Immutable truth?) and seen that both pertain
To you, and to the foreign branches married
To your gnarled trunk. You’d all but been remade,
Become another tree. But now your wild
Side’s showing, and the husbanded charade
You lived is over. Finally reconciled
To be one thing, you’ve cast aside a graft
That represented most of what you’d been,
Regenerating beautifully, a raft
Of fertile new limbs. And, as you begin
Anew, a ring of seeds, dropped by the old
You, sprout. Another lifetime’s stranglehold.