I have no knowledge
of my parents’ births.
Whether sunshine tapped on the window,
the wind strummed through the eaves
like a violin.
If rain was falling.
Time has puffed out the
flame of their beginnings.
Where heaven was
when they were delivered,
and like all humanity
born to uncertainty and hardship.
What I have are stories,
the sound of voices,
bodies touching,
and the confusion of happiness
and catastrophe.
Now being and non-being
cuts them off from me.
A river with no bridge.
On opposite sides, I hear no call,
no answer to mine.
I have seen nothing,
and turned away
to a geography without them.
Where years are the milestone
of distance in the same galaxy.
Yet the hands in front of me
are theirs.
These eyes that see are theirs.
Shadows in the woods
are seen the same.
Hunger at my plate is theirs.
My dreams are fashioned
in the same theater.
Holding things they used
and touched I say,
it is not over!
You are real!
I tuck you in at night.
I cry when I see my mother
watch her father die
when she was six.
My father confronting his
father’s suicide
when he was ten.
Bullets that tore their son
from them in war.
My father confronting his agony
in a vision,
confirmed by a telegram.
Poverty, worse than most.
For quests at our table,
more water in the soup.
What a lovely morning,
this morning in April!
The world blossoming.
Life composed in my heart
by love with remarkable people.
At the border of a mythical river,
an empty shore on the other side.
My hands holding the sunlight
of my life for them,
my words shivering with love.