Another Poem, and The Passage of Time

Today was a grieving day.  Weekends the hardest.  I try not to think forwards or backwards, but I do allow myself to feel the stone of grief that is a weight, and sadness.  CG has many comforting words, which I take in and appreciate, but still, the stone at the center, letting itself be known.  I hold it and wonder what to do with it, but there is nothing to do until the passage of time washes it clean and makes of it a gem.  I think that there are many "jewels" in the heart of the lotus which is this life.  Eventually time makes something better out of the rawest grief.  Grief is an honoring of what has been lost, of what was cherished.  Grief is also over my own behavior, and so much regret over my reactions and my anger also.

So, very little writing today here, but a poem I posted on Facebook today--just had a feeling someone in the ether over there needed this poem; from the comments there, I think someone did.  This is another poem for my father; I don't believe I have published this one anywhere:

                      My Father at Seventy

He hasn’t visited in two years, so it is a shock when he gets out of his car and I see how thin he has become, how quiet, this man who was the Jehovah of my childhood, his thunder-voice shaking the walls. Now he is no taller than the stalks of corn I planted last spring, he speaks softer than the wind brushing the elegant leaves of green parchment, and I notice how his thick hair has silvered as his skin deepens to a rich, seamed copper like the face of his native great-grandmother, a woman whose name has vanished like pollen released in shimmering breaths from the corn tassels, short puffs that shine for a moment and are gone. As he stands in my garden, I imagine he might grow small as a kachina among the pumpkin vines, each vine in full flower, each blossom like a raised chalice of sculptured gold. When the time comes and the earth seals itself over the body of my father, I want his eternity to be humid and fertile as the Mississippi delta where he was born, rain falling in sudden, steaming drops, a landscape nourished to such abundance it nearly melts in the heat and moisture. I look at my father, aged seventy, and realize I no longer want him to say he is sorry for the childhood he gave me, that it is enough to know the terrible flood of his anger has receded, leaving memories which glisten like shallow puddles on the long clay road a few miles from Jackson where we walked together thirty years ago past fields of what I thought were stunted rows of dead, dry shrubs until he plunged his hand straight between tangled stems like dense barbed wire and, without cutting himself, pulled out a shred of white cotton fragile as the love he concealed

   all my life, a softness hidden in a crown of thorns.