Guest Author: My Wife.

My wife L.Wallace decided to write a poem for "Siblings Day." Sadly, it isn't a light-hearted, celebratory stream of happy-go-lucky verse. Instead, it's a tragic overview of a family comprised of like-minded, self-congratulatory pack members who find dissent threatening. Objectively speaking, I wish she would write more:

A Group of Five:

A group of five, hatched one by one, they share a common time. The years go by; they grow and bond just like a nursery rhyme.
A decade passes, a generation, and now everyone knows their places.
A new hatchling arrives and though they rejoice, they also fear what she replaces.
She grows to be unique, so odd, and strong in her convictions.
Her style, her thoughts, her dreams aren’t ours; she must have some afflictions.
Because we are one, we don’t vector, we think as a unit. This is how we were meant to function.
This one thinks for herself and she backs it up, and we think she has too much gumption.
This hatchling is achieving things money can’t buy. She has no interest in money or gold. She craves knowledge and truth and works to the bone, and she does it on her own.
Well it’s obvious she’s out to make us look bad, by trying to be all she can be.
We must discredit and shun her from the pack, and then one day, she will see.
She’ll see that books and truth and knowledge are bobbles and she’ll parish never knowing real means.
That it’s who you pretend to be and how many you deceive and earn off someone else’s dreams.
Look at how she makes mom cry with each new accomplishment. Yet she still does more than her part, much to our admonishment.
But if she doesn’t stop trying to be nothing like us and if she earns just one more degree…
And if she tries to show us up by caring, and volunteering and not accepting things for free,
then all we say will be true and just, as she is no longer our sibling. She will continue to live in our shadows, the poor little misguided thing.