Pater Familias

You keep popping up

In the strangest places.

Walking into a room,

Your face appears,

Smiling the same odd way.

Real or not,

I know you’re there.

My shadow everywhere

Bumps into yours.

I hear your voice

Through doors

Long closed.

Even the dark

Assumes your shape;

You’re here so much,

The monsters under the bed

Have been complaining.

Beneath

In memoriam 11/11/11

These flowering legions

Cannot know

What glory hides:

Fields of the fallen, glimpsed

Along the route to Rheims:

Graveyards of Picardy

Where real poppies grow,

Transforming each minute spent

In recompense

For those

Whose silence is endless.

Fragments

The photo’s ripped:

Just us,

Kids inbetween,

One face torn off.

A backdrop that day of blue:

Ceanothus, Lilac, Wisteria

Trailing up to our room.

Smiles fixed

On a lens;
The darkroom of trust.

Acceptance can’t rescue

A moment lost,

More sacred than memory:

This missing piece.

Love's Mirror

I have sought eyes that I risked all to find,

Imprisoned in their sight; eyes that I longed to know

Were bright before light cast its antique spell,

Transfiguring love, which first (and last) is blind;

Eyes that held tears from which vast oceans flow,

Stirred secrets only other eyes can tell;

Learning how looks deceive the trust they sow,

Like ghostly mirrors, fated to remind.

Yet your gaze calls me back, dispelling fears

That, out of sight, the heart’s horizon fades:

Absence cannot be loss where we are whole

And moonstruck distance draws our mutual soul.

Recalling these sweet truths, your glance upbraids

This ‘I’ that, lacking you, sheds inky tears.

Munich

When the fog rolls in,
You can hardly see your feet.
You have to be there to remember.

I think of those kids
Every day of my life.
Heroes can’t atone
For what is  past.
You can’t undo time.


Growing old, I feel
Fate is always there
In the hope of each generation.

Some griefs can’t be shared.
We must bury our own.

Survival is never easy.