It’s difficult to remember, Sister,

looking at him now, but back then he was Zeus…

 

…at dinner I brought it up, expecting sympathy.

He paused from cutting his food

and looked at me as if ‘John Lennon’ was a curse,

like ‘God Damn’ or ‘Mother Fucker.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘That pinko commie,’

each word spit hard in my direction.

He stared at me a moment,

as if to emphasize his warning,

then abruptly continued to eat.

 

I didn’t know what a ‘pinko commie’ was

but I felt that it described someone like me,

a bookish and slight boy

with the tendencies of a woman,

and doubt of his love, like backfilling dirt,

began to trickle down

onto the lid of my coffin,

the one that every child carries waiting

to have to crawl into.

 

Decades later, while helping me paint a barn,

he began to apologize

but I waved it away

because I knew by then I had achieved

proof beyond doubt

that I was his kind of man, no pinko commie,

my own cartoon god

of sky and thunder and was certain

that his apology

would be for misjudging my character

rather than rejecting it

 

though now I’m not so sure

and wish that I had let him speak

while he still had a mind to.