The Garden of Verse (and Family): A Poem of My Father's Fortunate Escape, and My Own Good Reason to Stay the Course

Verse-Virtual

 

Where do the days go? They disappear pretty fast after we play with the clock once again, threading the darkness deeper into our lives. 

This month Verse-Virtual features a poem, called  "Documentary Evidence,"  remembering my father's escape from a perilous crossing of the English Channel as his regiment was being transported to the front in France. Some of you have heard this story from me. What's new -- for me -- is the story's confirmation by a TV documentary on the subject of this disaster. I will post the poem below. 

Documentary Evidence

On some channel I never watch I catch the Veterans

        Day doc in its last moments,
and pounce on the name of the transport ship,
snatching at details, 
fleetingly like the taunt of the witch in the old story 
	I can never quite get enough of –
The Leopoldville! –
and lose the thread at once.
It sinks beneath the waters of my short-term 

        whirlpool memory,
as the doomed vessel itself sends a thousand souls
scurrying for their lives, finding instead (many of

        them) cold water, last breaths.
The transport, that one of three,
that took the final bullet 

from the then death-spiraling 
	U-Boat reign of terror 
that had plagued for half a decade the English 

        Channel’s thin ribbon of liberation.
 
My father’s regiment divided among three ships,
Dad catching one of the luckier transports:
an entire line of ancestry.com, a generation’s destiny, 
	hanging on that chance
… And here before my tired eyes,
while stretching in front of the TV, 
surfing while supine,
the documentary evidence confirming a family’s 

        brush-with-fate survival story,
I recollect Dad recounting, a half century later, 
his fortunate escape from a plunge 

        into all that cold water,
and picture again the breadwinner who clung

        to the sandy shore in socks and shoes
while his children squirmed in the foam like fish.
 
Dad’s brush with destiny, confirmed on the screen:
Survivors as we are, not heroes,
I stick to my own fortunate course,
grateful for the lucky draw.

I have two other poems in the November issue. 

One, titled "Urban Transplant," one of my garden poems,

takes off from my ongoing struggle to make the 

"sidewalk strip" in front of our house bloom like an 

urban Eden. I've got a ways to go. 

The last poem, "Softer Stay," is about the subtle beauty

of that descent into winter.

To see those go to 

verse-virtual november