All that could go wrong

By E. Ethelbert Miller

now fills my life.

The face of my father

is now my own.

My hands now show

their age and not what

they have built.

I cannot sit at the

kitchen table without

thinking of him.

Head bent over his

meal and feeling the 

heat of it against his brow.

How hungry I was to know

what he felt and how afraid

of my father's hunger I became.

A man in my own house

with my wife's back to me.

In bed where I might have

slept alone if it was not

for some sense of duty

to death or marriage or

whatever comes next in this

life which kills so slowly

and every breath is his breath.

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