Category: Poetry Festival

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, then

How can it be?

And outside, mint-mist fog ripples like a clock ticking

Wildly without a cog to push it

And without a hand to tell.

I come alone in the morning into the minty smoke

That has sky for veins.

I come alone on a Sunday

To count the drops of the lapping lake water

Or the warm, black metal tins along the edge of it.

In silence, war wears no coat and makes

No promises.

War’s tangled colors are the ticking fog, the water, the tins,

The newspaper dance, the warm coffee.

War is my father whom I cannot define

And of whom I come from without definition or border.

From the water I come virginal, frozen.

From the water I come a bastard, an orphan,

And alone.

I come from my father but I am not my father.

I am the water.

The morning light water.

 

 

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