(High School) cryings#2 (to Kathy)

in the clouded-over moment
of blind wanderings
of pointless struggles
(o dont get me wrong
i gasp the brittle breath
my flesh turns blue
like theirs)
i sometimes pause.
in my own mire to
think of you
you stand
in the still-same mud
im standing soaking in and
tho you smile you
know muds mud and
yet you smile...
why
i
dont know and
yet i know you smile.

bob terashima, 1966

My Father's Father

My father's father lies in bed,

his form molds faintly through the sheets.

Laid bare, his head

upon the pillow holds the cracking of his age:

the suns that summered over fields of beets

and dried him out.

Strange. I watch him breathe slow mouthfuls

down his sleep. The drought

for life that parches at his lips

is strange to me;

I do not know this man who slips

away to death.

And yet, I grew up in his withering days.

I heard the shuffle of his feet through empty rooms

he waited in, and felt his gaze

grow hollow. Sometimes, when he smiled

his crooked mouth at me, the quiet growth

which fed upon his sorrow showed its roots,

and I would wonder why

I couldn't love my father's father.

Now I know. And now, as both

his dying and his living days are planted

in my mind, I wonder why

in time before my time, he sailed the sea

between himself, his wife and son, to dry

in fields of beets.

How he came to live with us

I never knew; just

that his strength was cracked,

and he had come to suffer through a wait

that only death would rid.

(I could have loved my father's father,

but my father never did)

bob terashima, 1966