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His Morning Meditations

My father in this lonely room of prayer
listens at the window
in the little house of his own dreams.

He has come a long way just to listen,
over seas and sorrow, through the narrow gate
of his deliverance.

And he dwells here now,
beyond the valley and the shadow, too,
in silence mustered day by dawn.

It has come to this sweet isolation
in the eye of God, the earliest of mornings
in his chambered skull, this frost of thought.

Jay Parini

2016

Portrait of My Father as a Pianist

Behind disinfected curtains,
           beyond touch of sunrise
devouring the terrible gold

           of leaves, a man could be
his own eternal night. City
           flattened to rubble, his

surviving height a black flight
           of notes: the chip-toothed
blade and oldest anesthetic.

           Escaped convict, he climbs
wild-eyed, one hand out—
           running its twin on the rails

of a broken Steinway.

Cynthia Dewi Oka

2017

My father, lungs a-warble, spreads his arms on the nursing
home bed,
swoops low over rough, unfamiliar terrain. The hospice nurse
ticks off procedures.
My mother signs papers with her large, lush loops, so ravishing,
more ravishing than the chicken-scratch scrawl of my father’s
hand,
clubbed now, a long-lost claw—phylogenesis recapitulated, and
ontogenesis, too.
Overhead, the geese tootle toward the marsh.
They’re rolling the old folks into the commons, lining them up
before the TV.

Betsy Andrews

2015

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