I know It Will Be Spring
I know it will be spring
When the geese take up and leave
Yes, they’re beautiful graceful things
Their droppings though my peeve
I resent the season
Migration filling skies
A calendar with reason
Even so tears my eyes
Autumn, but a slant of change
A casual cool correction
Beauty in flight high and strange
Season’s savage intersection
I remember the sun
On its loving summer arc
Children ever on the run
Sleeveless in the park
Grown to love warmth and ease
And even winter’s thaw
I see the cold an ugly tease
Catching me bitter and raw
Every day the feathered armada
Noisily hugs the shore
Summer is persona-non-grata
And I want it all the more
SEED TIME
Spring is coming
even to my narrow
little valley
I can tell because the post office
is delivering seed catalogs
and silence
the local vehicle of discussion
When people think you’ve erred
somehow their lives get larger,
Silent when you enter the room
Still, there’s a sadness
when seeds don’t come to
attention – straight and narrow
on the first or second try outside
Blindly swinging at weather
that isn’t there
No shame in a tear shed
As the seedling is brought back inside
put at the table (yet again) to feast
on the love and attention
it failed to imbibe in its rush
to bloom
Inside provides the walls the structure
that can now tame my seed’s
“pathological enthusiasm” –
the stuffing of too much life in soil
too lightly tilled
My Seedling:
Come inside where it’s warm
Do not regret your seed-time
Just learn – reall
Spring is coming
Seed catalogs
brighten winter’s gloom
Leafing the pages I await
you
Your authentic unrushed bloom
My Son: In His Own Sweet Way
~ I wonder what my son will think
When he is old and gray
Will he remember fiends from night
Or the sunshine from his days
~ I did what every parent wants
To raise strong and healthy kids
I am so afraid my labor’s lost
When I see him on the skids
~ Silly now, or so it seems
That imaginary age
When child puts away childish things
To turn the adult-like page
~ But there are days I get a peek
And see the son I wrought
He takes this life as serious lesson
That magically can be taught
~ Now most days I get a peek
Of the smile I used to coax
I know there’s sunshine in his heart
As it issues from his throat
~ It remains a joy to relax and bask
In these times I want to hold
But I should know as well as another
Nothing stays that’s gold
~ So I wonder what he will think
When I am old and gray
Will he remember terrorist nights
Or his sunny fields of play
~ I wonder too if he will see
The chimera, remora-like pain
Riding his parents’ loving hearts
In that symbiotic train
In Parenthood: No Crime Warrants This Catastrophe
I don’t know what the death of a child means – its purpose really – nor am I ready to lay the cause for such pain and misery at the feet of some ostensibly benevolent entity.
Two former colleagues will be burying their son today. Their son: my son’s lacrosse goalie, two years younger. This is tragedy writ large across the small town landscape of the human heart. A tragedy that speaks to the lie that the cities are where it’s at. Maybe when I figure out the IT of everything I will be better able to make a distinction between the pain wrought by a life – and a death.
What I do know is that becoming a parent can be the most joyful experience two willing people can embark upon together – the endless dreams founded on faith in love and the innocent sounds of new names – mommy and daddy. It must be what an addiction is like; looking into the eyes of your child and succumbing to the bone-melting moment when you realize that there is nothing, no one in the world you could love more. It is the moment you watch your toddler waltz around the lawn in a spring rain babbling the language of sheer happiness, arms spread wide, head held high as if sipping from some celestial chalice of innocence, that you know you would lay down your own life for this moment to continue. Children, loved, cherished – as it should be – infused into your veins every morning, every handhold, every neck hug, every embrace of that small sturdy body that holds the contents of your elixir, the potion you need to survive. Liquefied, cooked love – injected in the open for all to see – the tracks of which you are proud to expose. Children can make us whole.
As children can make us whole so too can they lay us low. There is emotion that resides in the cracked plaster and glass of all adolescent door slams – an emotion whose power, we
forget, is as strong an elixir for the adolescent as our fresh-parent love was for us. But it is the road out of the nest, to selfhood that we keep our eyes upon – beyond adolescence – when the parent-child relation ship is supposed to right itself – the waters begin to calm, the phone conversations end in “I love you(s)” – both ways. But before the road untraveled, we believe we are cursed; what did we do wrong? Worry – the congenital parental condition beginning, not with ours but with our child’s birth. Even as we wrangle with adolescence we begin to paint pictures of that road out of the nest, putting our dream-child squarely upon it, smiling and ecstatically babbling that sonorous, personal language of sheer happiness – it is this emotional chimera that saves us when all hell breaks loose. It is what keeps us on the edge of the grave looking in even as our flesh and blood is lowered into the earth – buried.
I realize my tears are useless in changing the scenario. They will not revive the loved ones of the T’s, A’s and the F’s. – the first initials of those friends and colleagues who have all buried their young.
To be a parent is to expect to bring that child to a healthy adulthood – it is what you deserve for all the love and parent-hours spent keeping that child alive and well. What these parents get for all their love is not what they deserve. There is no crime that warrants such catastrophe.
And so I wonder what it all means? I think of my own son, the vessel that walks the earth holding my heart and dreams – for him. And now my frustration with him, for his comparatively minor infraction of the adult responsibility code, pales with the knowledge that this frustration could be easily trumped – any day, any time…
