Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 4, Number 1. May 2021. ISSN: 2581-7094
My Father’s Dream
---
Carolyn Masel
He who studied Latin to the end of
his school days
was strangely unalive
to etymology – or what it could tell
you.
On the verge of retirement,
when younger partners made him share
a typist,
he complained of being made to feel
no longer current.
The following day he had a heart
attack.
Symbols and analogies
were also kept at bay.
If he couldn’t sleep, he took a
tablet.
No dreams and no accounting for
them.
But one morning, he staggered
downstairs,
running his hands through what was
left of his hair,
groaning.
Immersed in a bowl of OKs, I neither
encouraged nor discouraged him.
I didn’t think it made any
difference.
In the dream was a small Aboriginal
boy,
and something had gone missing. My
father said,
You stole it! I know you took it! And the child
denied it, but my father charged him
over
and over, and the boy was taken
away.
Then Dad found out it was someone
else entirely,
and he went to find the child, to
apologise
and set him free, but he learned
that the boy had died.