Poems for my Father
Poems about my Dying Dad
Wilderness
We’re lost in the wilderness,
Us three.
We can hear one another if we call loud enough,
But there are
No visuals.
Just thick green trees, all around,
One path,
Narrow and overgrown
Covered in vines and brush
Leading to
You know where.
I want to see you,
Dad.
I want to comfort you.
Reach out and hold you.
But you’re in another place now
Yet still here.
I feel far away
From everything.
From the city, from God, from love.
I exist only in this forest
On this path.
Where this trail goes there is no return.
Yet I want to know
How you feel.
I call out to Mom in the foggy forest
And she yells back,
‘I’m here.’
But she sounds so distant.
A hundred miles away.
This is the painful heroism of humanity.
What Camus and Kierkegaard wrote about.
This moment before the light is extinguished
Is all we have.
The candle flickers
And it’s gone.
***
Wolf
What do you do
In the grotesque face of
Death?
Do you smile, in your dumb shadowy fear?
Do you remain stoic and tight-lipped like a 5th century Grecian?
I got out of my electric car to charge it
And I heard myself emit a sound between a human sigh and a wounded wolf.
Glancing up I caught a man’s eyes
I did not look away.
He removed his eyes quickly
For he’d surely seen something
Feral
In me.
And I ask myself, naked before God,
Before
The world:
What does it take to let go?
To accept this?
To be free?
"The candle flickers / And it’s gone." and "And I heard myself emit a sound between a human sigh and a wounded wolf." are lines that struck me especially. Both poems are exquisitely aching.