MOTHER'S DAY

AND FATHER'S DAY

ARE COMING UP

Poem For Today - May 4, 2014

PARENTS

For Vanessa Meredith

and Samuel Wolf Gezari

What it must be like to be an angel

or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner.

The last time we go to bed good,

they are there, lying about darkness.

They dandle us once too often,

these friends who become our enemies.

Suddenly one day, their juniors

are as old as we yearn to be.

They get wrinkles where it is better

smooth, odd coughs, and smells.

It is grotesque how they go on

loving us, we go on loving them.

The effrontery, barely imaginable,

of having caused us. And of how.

Their lives: surely

we can do better than that.

This goes on for a long time. Everything

they do is wrong, and the worst thing,

they all do it, is to die

taking with them the last explanation,

how we came out of the wet sea

or wherever they got us from,

taking the last link

of that chain with them.

Father, mother, we cry, wrinkling

to our uncomprehending children and grandchildren.

© William Meredith (1919-2007)
Painting on top: Felix Vallotton,
Parents