Verge & Exodus by Ann E. Michael
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| Image | Tetyana Kovyrina |
Verge & Exodus
On the road’s verge, five geese looking unctuous,
vaguely irritable as I pass them
going 50 on the route I’ve taken for decades
and this time I recall two years back, when my dad
was failing, how eagerly I sought any sign
of seasonal change—
early-flowering witch hazel or crocuses, quince,
swells in daffodils’ green emergence
while inside myself the slow emergency of his dying
began to open from probable to imminent. Back then
I drove south idly; through the windshield
I looked forward to nothing,
as my mother talked of nothing when he floated
in his haze of pain and Dilaudid, holding one hand
over his head as though he could,
with his fingertips, pull the ache from his left ear
over his head and into the room
where it might exit.
Now, the exodus occurs elsewhere, in refugee waves,
people whose minds and bodies lug their different pains
across other kinds of borders.
My father’s experience of earth has ended,
his baptism complete. His birthday was in April.
See there, along the roadside? Daffodils.
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Ann E. Michael
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Life and loss, our bittersweet journey.
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