News of my father's imminent death--

Today they told you that there was nothing left for you except to die--
And dear father, did you ever think for a moment about Dylan Thomas?
Or is your mind filled with Blakean visions?

What will we do without you?
Man who took off his wooden shoes and never looked behind him
But always gloriously ahead—
What do you envision for yourself?
Are you at peace with everything that you said and did?

“Whenever any Individual Rejects Error and Embraces Truth, a Last Judgment passes upon that Individual’

Hard-working father--
Do you know how your children worship you?
Do you witness how our own ambivalence is melting away…
In the face of your own stoicism—

Dear Father teach us courage and teach us love
Teach our mother how not to miss you in her bed

Teach us how to move furniture from one house to the next
Without you and your car to pile things on top of the hood.

Teach us how to cultivate inner peace
And how to make amends

“Mutual Forgiveness of each Vice,
Such are the Gates of Paradise.”

Please teach us more than this
There are still lessons in you for us to learn

Without you
We can only imagine the answers you might give
Without you Life might seem a little less plentiful
So, dear father, if it please you…

“Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

The deafening silences between the two that thought they could be friends--

You could have sent word that everything was all right between us
But your silences speak louder than any sentences you might have crafted.

Your hostility towards me in my hour of darkness
The inablility to forgive
Lets me know how much we have lost.

Lost to you, I now find myself speechless.

Speechless I no longer know what to say

And the chasm widens--

As i discover
The possible
Impossibility
Of remaining friends.

tribute to my father...

i have decided to post about my father for a spell, to celebrate his life and in turn celebrate my own, since he helped shape the person i am today.

i was never really a 'daddy's girl' by any stretch of the imagination but i do know that i shared similar traits with him and this allowed us an understanding of each other-- we would wax philosophic together about a wide range of topics...

my father and i are both mavericks.

after surviving the second world war; leaving the old world and all his family behind, he traveled across the ocean in quest of the 'american dream'-- canadian style. although the canadian version differs from the america in some subtle ways they both share the dream of 'freedom' and for most immigrants that has a powerful draw. i think what most immigrants do not realize, is that they will have to break their backs working very hard to make this dream come true, and perhaps never in the end obtain the things they ever dreamt of.

my father landed in montreal--enrolled in university as an engineer and basically survived by selling his blood to the red cross. he even saved enough money to buy an underwood typewriter.

he came to canada during a time when a man could work for a company and be pretty much guaranteed to be employed with the same company for his whole life. how times have changed.

i remember the day my father retired. i went to his office with him to pick up his stuff. dusty framed photos of the family, paperclips, old notes--while we were packing up his boss came in, a fast-talking greasy-haired young whippersnapper. he rattled on about how the company would miss my father and what a great job he had done. he seemed so insincere and trite but perhaps that is because he had only been hired on a few months before my father decided to retire, so he really did not know the man. the man who crossed the ocean wearing wooden shoes.

i think he felt that he had to say something and so he pulled his old salesman speech out from underneath his slippery tongue. i remember thinking that this was a clash of cultures--a generational shift--and a profound moment that was lost on this younger man. it was there and then that i understood his need to retire early and after working hard all his life to feed and clothed his family--he was finally free!

now he could begin
to really live
the 'canadian dream'...

knocking on plastic--

they say that in troubling times you find out who your real friends are...i am learning this to be true.

have you ever lost a loved one?
how does one survive it?

all around us the world swirls in mad conflict--people fighting with each other, against each other. greed, avarice and pride plays itself out for its witnesses. implacable.
when will we learn to love? when will be embrace differences as a forte instead of a launching pad for strife?

nobody wins in battles, even if they declare a victor.

'peace now for all men or amen to all things'--kenneth patchen