In five long years I’ve had to mourn And find in loss a good, Time has not relieved the tears I shed But leaves me weak and overworn. I try to visit my lonesome father In the early spring and in the dying day, To release my woes into the ether. But I cannot; and so I stay. Five years have passed and still the thoughts And memories of happy arrivals with plagued Departures remind me of my grief and recall To me the times I ventured to his grave: I once did go on his fifty-third year, In crisp winter’s chill and the cold frost Of a December morning. I wept As I walked through tombstones and crossed To his plot. My sadness reborn for what I’d lost; And once I came on Father’s Day with flowers That I withdrew fast, so I Did not highlight his sorry state And have him ponder why Even flowers have an unannouncéd fate. They slowly wither, and wilt, and die; And once in the highest point Of summers brightest sun I went to picnic by his grave For sake of validation. But I felt alone amidst the stones And ate my lunch as one. I went again when leaves were falling and under My feet they crackled and crunched as I, brave In the field of storied stamps of history That gave their ages, approached my father’s grave. I came across the plots that bear my name: Four in order rest, as four in order died In lives of fifty years, of woes the same; Names etched in rock and each below their bride. All their lives from father’s son to father’s son The latest still with a coat of glossy shine To contrast, from setting sun to setting sun, The engrossed graves: now a mossy shrine. And so it came that I denounced in fear This, my familial fraternity, In the clarity of autumn’s fading days And cool, crisp air; with leaves from branches falling Separately, but in the same lonesome fall That each must make and times before was made. Because I spite the movement of my grief And Death for changes brought and still to come, I cannot go back to that solitary site Where my confined and coffined father lies, I reject the nature of this life, his gift, And so, reject mortality. So I ask you (from a distance), Father, Excuse this fear and know: Soon these long five years will become five more And from me these wary woes will flee. Whether in a passing afternoon On a lazy summer’s day; or a picnic at Your marble door among the budding blossoms Of spring; I’ll think of you and be Forever in your company. Or in my death, when winter snow falls ‘round Our majestic hill in a perfect row of five We’ll lie and share the ground In eternal company.