To a Not So Good Father

a Father’s Day poem

How I could have seen your face
so many years ago and understood you then!
But it’s okay, Dad. It was just that old devil
who clutched your boyish heart
and squeezed it like a lemon husk.

I see you now, clearly. And how
in the 1950s you were a little boy at play
in fields you couldn’t understand.
And that you did your best on a jubilee day,
aloft a tree and reaching in

to stroke a little nest of twigs and baby birds.
And though you let the devil win later,
in that simple moment you were just
another me, sung inside eternity
no matter how grotesque the song.