Dad’s Greatest Gift
He lay in a barred bed,
an old man in diapers
in a too-hot room.
“My head went pop,” he said.
Then sleep caught him
from one breath to another.
I chattered on after he dozed,
speaking to an absence
as I had so often before.
His once ample, laborer’s frame shrunk.
Stick legs and stick arms.
Gray skin and gray stubble.
He lived those last, post-stroke days as before,
adrift in acceptance,
good natured,
just out of reach.
Yet he gave the gift at last,
the one he’d wrapped at my birth,
the one I’d awaited so long.
As I rounded a corner in that nursing home,
he saw me from his wheel chair and smiled.
“Look, it’s my first-born son,”
he told the attendant.
And that simple phrase,
even in my 50s,
watered me
and planted my feet.
The earth opened
and took my roots.
It’s good to be here.
* * * *
Note: My father, by constitution and early shaping, was an internal man
little given to expression. Though we shared time, his heart remained hidden.
His love for me did not step forward until the moment described in this poem.