From the Water, Poetry by Allison J. Call

Genre: Relationship, Family

From the Water by Allison J. Call

Like many of you, I burrow seasonal trenches

Up and down and through,

Weaving my way through the ideology

That tomorrow’s winter will ever be colder than today’s.

I prefer a Sunday dance around a newspaper

And a misty cup beside my father’s silence,

And I prefer the cold hands of a February morning

Tightening its delicate grip around

My most vulnerable.

I prefer all this, all this to what’s really.

My father counts one every year,

Because dawn is MY years old,

I control the seasons

And he couldn’t possibly die.

He is too wrong, too opposite of me.

Too set in his ways to let the ice grip him

As it grips me.

He’s too much my father to be a poet.

And he never told me that he was, and if he

NEVER told me he was…