It was Christmas. The moringa trees along
the sidewalks & the front yard were in full bloom.
Flames played upon logs &
corns had nothing to show for it but burn.
Many years before. Many years before, my father
walked heavily into the sunlight; he knew
somewhere within the numbness that grew
from the center of his being that a part of his life
was over. I cannot say I remembered what
his presence tasted like—I knew his voice
by its estranged silence. How children trembled
like soft clouds before his gaze. My mother’s
kitchen was holding on to the bright, crisp cold
of early Spring, & she was sitting tightly
by the corridor, waiting & waiting. I must confess a thing
or two about hope: that sweet scent of dying
lilac blossoms, that which beheads
for beauty—bruised beauty caged in a vase.
I am before anything else, my mother’s son before my father’s son.
The immeasurable sadness our mouths garner even when
we try to decant our troves of laughter. The sadness churns, so
happiness is not enough. Our pasts enter our present,
so we must come out of the purgatory—at least with ourselves.
I forgive my old man with everything in me, but the absence.
Absence—