Tuesday Poem: Lament

Lament

There’s no memory I can claim

of my father and his fiddle

save for stories my older sisters rustle up,

and then he exists again

on a winter evening, the dishes washed,

my mother granting permission to stay up late

as he bowed the jigs & reels

carried across the Atlantic by his father

from County Wexford, 1912.

I imagine he was in his first heaven

those nights around the kitchen table,

the velvet-lined fiddle case opened

to its lump of flannel-wrapped rosin,

his six grace-notes of daughters

laughing and clapping out a beat.

I was young and fell asleep

on someone’s lap.

I’m told sometimes he laid the fiddle down

and swept my mother up in dance

on the old linoleum with its glaze of wax —

my mother’s pride —

and when he called her “Frenchie”

she giggled and blushed to his bold kiss

on her cheek, still in harmony

after so many measures. 

 

© T. Clear



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