Where are you Wade,Now when you should be here,making old people jokes at your own expensebefore we can make them for you.You should be here,unwrapping presentslike it was your Happy Fifthinstead of your fiftieth,making everybody laugh.You should be herecharming childrenwho will never forget you,the biggest one of themthey ever saw,proving growing up is optional.You shouldContinue reading “Wade’s Fiftieth Birthday Poem”
Tag Archives: sons
Graduation Poem for Chad
This is the crossroads where the pole-mounted cart wheels with their burden of broken criminals, that interminable line like telephone poles dwindling into the valley, the one that stretches back down the waterless mountain road interrupted at intervals by crow cages full of half picked bones, is supposed to stop, where the heel bruising stonesContinue reading “Graduation Poem for Chad”
Mining Disaster
My father woke up startled every time, as bug-eyed as Fuseli’s nightmare horse, as if around him the collapsing mine crushed on him still with overwhelming force. As if plucked back by magic from the dead, like undead Lazarus stunned for breath he sat, looked at the plaster cracking overhead for one last fatal tremblorContinue reading “Mining Disaster”
My Father is up to His Neck in Coal
My father buried to the neck in coal, when the blast he set went off too soon and the shaft sluiced rock like water roaring down, pouring it over him in a rattling stream until only his head could move, hung suspended there an hour or more before somebody came and raised the cry. MenContinue reading “My Father is up to His Neck in Coal”
All My Ancestors Breathe With Me
I like to watch my breath go up the sky, winter nights when the sky is royal blue, like a ghost late for heaven and climbing fast. I think my Norse ancestors stood the same, the snow crunching under their shuffling feet on the late watch, breathing puffs of spirit upward. And the Welsh magicianContinue reading “All My Ancestors Breathe With Me”
William John Watkins 