Legacy
Our father has dropped off, turned himself
into history. We try to illustrate his features
with fond elegiacs but it comes out as gabble
and what we first had in mind quickly recedes.
We once managed to remember his voice
in steady drums of rain upon the windowsill.
This was our way of mourning. He ridiculed it.
As if to prompt us, strands of his whitish hair
now block the basin. We’ve scraped him away
yet he multiplies. His ghost fills the corridors.
So many times we’ve tried to shake him off
as if he were dust on a rug, a kind of debris.
Yet blood sticks. There are so many ways
in which he has escaped the hugeness of death.
At night he twiddles with the taps and by day
his silhouette jellies in the backdrop of mirrors.
Not because of mischief, but from a lasting will
to leave his stamp on us all. To let us know
he considers his life an unfinished epic.
Page(s) 14
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