My father-in-law

 Lucidity – blinking and broken

Has declared his life a night

A forgotten dimension

So fast

Where did it go?

92 years inside

The forest of human travel

Following the script

Of human hand

The hand that sent him to war

To love

To fatherhood

To the hearts of those

Who would wash his sluggish body

Wrinkled, tissue depleted

Immobilized by an angry destiny

And landscapes of untold design

And still he wondered why?

As the answer awaited at the forest’s rim

Where the path – well- trodden

Called – he is moving there now

Beyond that forest

To the open sky-filled field

Where the flowers will wildly bloom

In the spring of his step

Steps – light and inoffensive – like him

A child in this fractal world

Enfolding unto himself

Even as Nature reclaims him

Her son

Guiding him on that path

Swaddled in linen

Looking ahead in painless

Expectation