They still locked up mothers there for being mad
Daring to call the tall walls of stone -- a park
The gray covering over the ill deeds like a veil
Shock treatments to silence the voices
People heard only in their heads
Part of that 1950s savagery, they called therapy.

Maybe our mothers met locked in the same cell
Your mother looking for a key in the sunlight
Mine seeking signs of salvation on my forehead,
She swearing God had tatooed the crucifix there
One she could not always find
As if the Catholic cross I bore on my back
From grammar school was not enough

Maybe both our mothers met my father there
That incompetent hero of a sailor
Who split with the gifts after the wedding 
Returning a home a week later with VD
That attendant operating outside the bars
Courageous enough for Korea
But not for fatherhood,
Whose final leaving left my mother pleasing
With her voices to bring him back
Swearing from the wrong side of the hospital's bar
To be a better person if they did,
Swearing to God she would dedicate her life to her fatith
If God would only keep me safe,
Shocked again and again into forgetting
Me, my father, but never her faith.