…
My father died 9 years ago today at the age of 92. I wrote this sonnet toward evening. Dad died around noon. If I remember correctly, I noticed the swallows had returned (and would remain until the end of summer) around that time. Dad would have made a note of their arrival had he not died.
238
I threw the oyster crackers on the lawn.
The sparrows came, the cardinal, the squirrel
and the opossum, but not my father.
The oyster stew is defecated, gone
That meal is done, but on the lawn shadows
move, half-figured forms for what I’ve thrown.
The same old sun is setting in the sky
a thinning line outlining trees with light.
In living eyes that close the glowing dies.
Perhaps that’s why Dad didn’t close his eyes.
All that I know, all that I see, the stream,
the house, the trees will share the dark with me.
Memory glimmers abstract with tears
remembering in seconds seventy years.
