(When Your Parents Were Made of Light Free Verse)

You arrived in our lives already legendary,
made of light,
my mother, Professor of Speech,
turning every silence into a sonnet,
her voice a cathedral where words knelt and rose again.
My father, Professor of European History
and the most brilliant pastor who ever climbed a pulpit,
walking through centuries as casually as hallways,
carrying Charlemagne in one pocket
and mercy in the other.

Onstage my father wore the crown of Henry VIII,
beard like fire, voice like rolling cannon,
a king who could command the tides of nations
and still come home to tuck us in.
He was Prospero too,
staff raised against the storm he’d summoned,
eyes full of old magic and older mercy,
breaking his wand only when the play was done
and the real world needed a gentler spell.

My mother stepped out as Maria in Twelfth Night,
quick as silver, bright as mischief,
tongue sharper than any rapier
yet soft enough to cradle every broken heart in Illyria.
She fooled counts, outwitted stewards,
and somehow, between the lines,
fooled the entire audience
into believing joy could be this clever.

But the greatest roles they ever played
were never listed in the program.

Mother could scold us in blank verse
and make it sound like blessing.
Father preached Sunday sermons
that quoted Luther, Lincoln, and Lear
without ever losing the thread of grace.
We sat in the front pew, my twin brother and I,
awed that the man who had just thundered like Henry
still knelt to tie our shoes.

At dinner they debated the Renaissance
while passing mashed potatoes,
turned homework battles into scenes from Twelfth Night,
corrected our grammar in flawless Elizabethan insults
that somehow left us laughing so hard
the whole house shook like a ship in a comedy.

Offstage, Henry forgave debts no court could levy,
Prospero laid down his books to build us blanket forts,
and Maria (our Maria)
turned bedtime into the best prank ever pulled on darkness:
two small children convinced the night itself
was only another servant waiting for her next command.

They taught us that language is a superpower
and history is just love with better record-keeping,
that a stage can be a kitchen table
and a pulpit can be a bedtime story
if the heart behind it is large enough.

We grew up believing intellect was kindness,
that brilliance could be gentle,
that a person could quote Montaigne
and still know exactly how we liked our eggs.

They never broke character as our parents,
not once.
Every entrance was on time,
every exit left us wanting more,
and the curtain never truly fell
because their light kept taking bows
in everything my sister and I have ever done.

We were raised by a king who ruled with tenderness,
a magician who only wanted peace,
a countess’s clever maid who ruled the world with wit and wonder,
and two joyous, dazzling professors
made of light
who treated every ordinary day
like the greatest story ever told
and cast their boy and girl twins as the heroes
they already knew we would become.

We were the luckiest children in history,
watching Henry, Prospero, and Maria
perform the longest-running show on earth:
how to be gloriously, dazzlingly human
for two ordinary twins
who needed parents
and got living legends made of light instead.