Requiescat by Terry Savoie

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Requiescat… 

In retirement Dad had a second life humping stuff 

for St. Vincent de Paul, Goodwill & the local soup kitchens: 

canned army-surplus fruit, stale, day-old bread from bakery outlets, 

dead men's clothes – spring jackets in autumn, winter coats in summer – 

humping anything available.  Call him in the dead of any night, & out 

the door he’d fly, maybe heading for the Greyhound bus station 

to give a down-&-outer a lift to the Milwaukee midtown YMCA, 

often slipping him a fiver without asking anything in return.  

The next evening you’d catch him driving out to the County Home

(what the old timers still called the Poor Farm) on the city’s outskirts,

a four-floor, red brick, Depression Era structure for stacking in veterans 

& collections of old geezers like so much cordwood, eight or more in what 

were then called dorms with the urine stench so ungodly rank & desperate

for fresh air that the odor would manage to crawl out past the screen doors 

& wicker rockers lining the veranda in an attempt to make a beeline for 

any visitor’s arrival, the stench smacking a visitor in the face before

asking if he’d like to come in, sit for a spell & chew the fat. But

rest assured, Dad wasn't any sort of saint, not by a long shot.  

He’d say he was just an everyday bloke who preferred sitting in on

a couple hands of canasta before heading back home if a few 

of the boys had some time to kill & nowhere else to go.

 ​​A saint?  He’d give you the horse laugh on that one! 

                       Just another working stiff who didn’t get beyond 

the eighth grade, never read much, & couldn’t suffer wasting 

a perfectly good summer evening sitting in front of the TV. 

Even after the cancer landed him in one such home, he still enjoyed 

playing a hand or two before shuffling off to empty his "bag" for the night.  

At his funeral, the only prayers I found worthy of him were from his old buddies, 

those who humped stuff too, but they didn’t have much to say either, just their same 

uneasy self-conscious shuffling of feet with that characteristic look my father also had 

when words would fail him. They had that same shuffle for my father, for themselves, & 

I pray maybe a bit left over for me as well, a silent prayer to the Maker who, looking 

down on all of us standing there, also held tightly to His silence, keeping any 

pertinent comments He might’ve held to Himself.  

© Terry Savoie

Terry Savoie

Terry Savoie’s poetry has been included in over two hundred literary journals such as APR, Poetry (Chicago), Ploughshares, North American Review, Commonweal American Journal of Poetry and The Iowa Reviewas well as in recent numbers of North Dakota Quarterly, One, andAmerica, among others.

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