Remembrance

I’ll never see my father’s gravestone,
nor trace his fading footprints
through the Kansas that I’ve forgotten.

The place is lost to me, a myth
of flowing wheat fields framed
in sunflowers. His home: no longer mine.

X doesn’t mark my buried
childhood on the map. Some steps
I can’t retrace; too much has passed.

Yet these byways that my feet
refuse to wander, ramble
too well-trodden through my mind.

They lead to this unyielding plot
of grave-soil, this hidden
shaft of grief I’m loathe to mine.

I see his headstone clustered
amid the markers of our kin,
the names familiar, but not quite recognized.

His sharply chiseled name
reveals too much in its silence;
I find too little solace in mine.

My questions weigh on my tongue
like cold granite. Stone
yields no answers.

I graze the rigid surface
with my fingertips, in a vain
attempt to claim some fading warmth,

then linger for a moment
on the dash between the dates
but the tiny scar in the stone
still holds his secrets.