Kaddish

Today, entering the house from the garden,

I turned, involuntarily, to look back,

but saw nothing more than what is always there,

small rooms of eclectic evergreens – olive,

camellia, rhododendron, bay –

and, for some reason, I thought of my father

dead for almost as long as I have lived.

 

I have shuffled what I know of him

like a pack of cards in a game of patience

for a lifetime – would he approve, be proud,

that twenty six year old secular Jew

from North West London, a personable

young man by all accounts, whose friends were artists?

 

As I grew old enough to be his father,

and then his grandfather, I began

to think of him less and less with longing,

but always as my loss, and my mother’s,

when she lived, and his family’s – and my loss

had as much to do with a heritage lost

in that pack of cards as with lost love.

 

Today, I thought, for the first time, of what

he had lost – of all those years never known,

of all the sweetness of being alive –

and hoped, as he lay dying from sepsis

four thousand miles from those he loved,

he became too delirious to see

what he would never know.