I warned readers before that from time to time, I would be posting some of my poetry. This is for Father's Day, and it goes out especially to the people from The Gables who heard me read it.
As I told them, it's a prose poem. How to define a prose poem...would be boring. Let's just say that sometimes the rhythms and thought progressions of prose gather themselves to a focal point with the kind of force characteristic of poems. Think of Ecclesiastes in the King James Bible--aren't there passages you feel are more "poetic" than many poems, which are all too often prose heaved into lines, going from bad to verse?
The dream was real, and became part of a journal I kept for my son through his first year. The son is real, too--27, living in Minneapolis-St. Paul, helping to manage a music club.
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I dream you have already been born, a boy, and I am showing you how to fly. For years I have worked on my flying, learning when the signal in my midsection tells me I have the power, throwing myself off fearful heights and having them turn into soaring flights, steadily increasing the altitudes to which I can ascend, the distances I can travel, the scenes I can watch below. Now I want to show you all I have learned, the utmost I can do. With a supreme effort, I move across the sky at my greatest possible speed, arms outstreched, actually for the first time sending contrails streaming behind me. I look down to make sure you are watching.
But instead, you are flying yourself, easily rising upward and zooming downward, effortlessly turning, flipping and slipping happily about, unconcerned about what is above or below, utterly absorbed in the joy of your new-found capability.
And I realize: you are a better flyer already than I will ever be.
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