LITERARY: Lamento de una Hija por su Padre

By Bella Balisi-Bevilacqua

My heart, a small and stubborn candle, keeps your light,

Though winds have taken you beyond immense rooms of pain.

I walk among the rooms where your footsteps linger yet,

And touch the furniture of memory with trembling hands.

The morning keeps your coffee and hat upon its shelf of air,

The kettle and AM radio sings the same old note, and I expect your smile.

You are a country-road of voice that turns into silence,

A garden left at dusk where roses fold and wait.

Father, I am not ready to let your shadow go;

I do not know the measure of an absence such as this.

When you taught my hands to learn the world’s small laws,

You gave me maps for sorrow and directions to be brave.

Yet maps become thin paper in the storm of losing you,

And courage is a garment I cannot quite adjust tonight.

I count the afternoons when laughter braided us like light,

I count the stitches of your grave, each tender and precise.

Your hands were instruments of work and kindness both,

They cupped the small and lifted heavy burdens off my back.

How can the firmament hold one soul and not another?

The sky seems injured for its careless keeping of you.

I speak your name into the hush to see it answer me,

And only echoes come that sound like distant kindness.

Tell me, if you can, what country holds the quiet now,

Is there a place where fathers tend their daughters’ dreams?

I am orphaned in the sudden grammar of the day,

Each sentence now unfinished without your patient verb.

The house is full of memories that have not learned to live,

They wait like quiet guests who cannot find the time to leave.

You were the ledger where my small accounts were balanced,

Your counsel weighed the currency of my uncertain heart.

How dull a coin, now, the language of ordinary things,

When every cup I raise contains the echo of your name.

I try to thread my grief into the fabric of the dawn,

To stitch a morning from the cloth of what you left.

The sun itself seems guilty, rising as if in haste,

And I resent its mercy for not staying in mourning with me.

Yet love, that stubborn seed, persists beneath the snow,

It pushes up in green, in spite of seasons’ cruel laws.

I keep your watch within my chest, a tremulous gear,

It ticks with memory and with the hope you taught me then.

Sometimes at night I think I hear the careful step returning,

A footfall on the stairs that will not come and yet I wait.

I speak of you to children who have never known your laugh,

I tell them how a father’s patience softens iron days.

Forgive me when my sorrows make a bitter testament,

I bargain with the stars to trade my years for one more hour.

If pleading could unfasten heaven’s closed hand, I’d beg,

But pleading bows into the river of the inevitable.

So I will keep your portrait in the small room of my days,

And tend the living flame until it meets you at last. (MBB)