What Was Waiting
From miles across the sprawling ocean,
from the trance of childhood,
my father came to this country
into a stale air of daylight
and broken promise.
Surely all things new were an invasion to bear, the
space between him and others papered over with politeness.
Certainly this must have seemed a bland world of cement
compared to his remembrance of
Nightingales at dusk above the deep green hedges
beyond the orchard, the fragrance of harvest
measured against the trickery of this new world.
What could he covet here?
Perhaps all the stories he'd never tell, maybe because
they were not good enough.
But as I tinker with these handful of words
I create a kind of miracle, a page of his own, where he enters
alive again, more fulfilled than he was, finally loved,
center stage, the star of this poem I am finishing for him.
© Grace Cavalieri, all rights reserved
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