You’re quiet today, Daddy,
none of your usual defenses
I could repeat word for word;
nor your lengthy sermons eclipsing
all my efforts at some kind
of closeness.
We’ve been travelling wordlessly
across Brooklyn; these streets
familiar to you, far away from
barefoot tracks, gullies, cart-roads;
another world you left behind;
chose to forget.
I’ve been silent, too, on poems
I wrote but never showed you:
the one I called “His Holyness”
where, having made it into Heaven,
you choose the mansion farthest from us.
Or the poem I named “Da Da.”
Skilled in woodwork,
artist in your own right,
you, like the Dadaists, carved
out your resistance against
the norms that tried to hold you,
you chose your art, your skill,
the freedom you felt they stood for
above your own (I will not say it!)
I abandoned those poems
not wanting to dishonor you.
We’re here now, Daddy.
We’ve sung the last hymn
and the last prayers have been said.
They’re lowering your coffin
into the grave where all is silence,
the earth complicit as it covers you.
I, too, have no wish to uncover
those spaces you tried filling
with words that kept falling
through.
Your silences were kinder.