Don's Blog Our Parents 11-21-19

On this my 84th birthday it is appropriate  to send out this poem sent to me by my brother many years ago.  

     Our Parents

        — for my brothers

      Our parents died at least twice,

      the second time when we forgot their stories,

      or couldn't imagine how often they craved love,

      or felt useless, or yearned for justice

      in this world. In their graves, our parents need

      for us is pure, they're lost without us.

      Their honeymoon in Sea Island does or does not 

      exist. That late August in Lakeside

      we can decide to make them happy.

      What is the past if not unfinished work,

      swampy, fecund, seductively revisable?

      We try to say what happened in that first house

      where we were ,  like most children, the only

      needy people on earth. We remember

      what we were forbidden, who got the biggest slice.

      Our parents, meanwhile, must have wanted something

      back from us. We know what it is, don't we?

      We've been alive long enough.

     Stephan Dunn

     Prairie Schooner

     Volume  73 Number 2

     Summer 1999