Tag Archives: Family

Poem

Following His Advice

I go to my father for advice.
He is dying, can barely speak.
It is January. The tumor eats him,
loves the taste of his brain, chomps
even now as I sit at the foot of his bed.
It takes a long time for him to make words.
This is what he slowly says to me:

1. It will be okay
2. It doesn’t make sense
3. There will be more

He is gone before February is gone.
Even the shortest month of the year is too long for him.

I held these words
behind my ears:

There will be more.

He was right.
One, two, three.
He was right.

(originally written in June 2020; edited in 2023)

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Poem

Tending to the Fern

There are walls and there are windows,
mostly white, mostly clear but with

trails through dust carved by the rain
two weeks back, the first of the season.

I have two plants: one fern and one pothos.
I thought I could give them equal attention

but like a parent with a problematic child
I tend more to the fern, watering its soil and

misting its leaves, strengthening where it is weak
while the pothos drapes green and full of life

down the bookcase. I heard what he called me
in the kitchen when no one else was home,

said I was a bad daughter. Well, he did not
tend to me so what did he expect.

Now and then I pull a dead leaf from the
pothos. Both plants came from the same store.

(written in 2019; largely edited in 2023)

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