We had so little time dad.
Why did you have to do
that crossword puzzle
instead of talking with me
on the train we shared
by chance that morning
on your way to work?
Our worlds crisscrossing
vacant backyards whizzing by
your pencil tapping the newspaper
letters filing into their numbered rooms
the pounding, screeching, gliding steel
commuters getting on-off
their bowed taciturn faces.
As a boy I thought work was a place
you went to finish your dreams.
In truth, it’s where you buried yours
in the foundation of someone else’s.
Yet yours was the noblest sacrifice
money, merely digits in the squares.
Your lessening figure descending
the stairs through the train’s tinted glass
into the black and white boxed work yard
I pick up your unfinished puzzle, your warm pencil
tapping, I begin filling in the blanks
each letter a day, each word a year
our lives the theme, your death the puzzle
Glenn Harrington is a painter who exhibits his figurative, landscape and portrait paintings nationally. His portrait, “Brooks” from the Golden Pheasant Inn, won the Portrait Society of America’s Draper Grand Prize. Glenn has illustrated the poems of William Shakepeare and W.B. Yeats. He paints and writes from his Bucks County schoolhouse.
Poet’s Corner is curated by Bucks County Poet Laureate Tom Mallouk and supported by a grant to the Bucks County Herald Foundation made possible by Marv and Dee Ann Woodall.
To submit a poem for consideration, email it to Heraldpoetscorner@gmail.com.
If the poem has been previously published, please say where it first appeared.
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