A Poem for My Son

A Poem for my Son

Sleep tight, little one
there snug in your lamb's cloud.
Your mother's milk
puts you out faster than
Van Winkle
in a house full of
down.
I'll burn the oil for you,
sucking down coal and ash
to forge diamonds
from dimes.

My hands are blistered and raw
in the summer,
callous cracked and hard
come frost.
They've driven nails in furnaces
of ice,
busted stone to make bridges
to
bank note safety.
My feet are roughshod and weary,
legs knurled like iron,
age spots upon sunburn,
an encyclopedia of scars,
teeth gritted
or chattering
I'll always have
two father's arms
to rock you.

Your mother's eyes are kind
and blue,
her lips are red as the dawn
over
gray granite
mounds.
Her hands are soft and yielding
to your every
sigh.
She loves you, young man.
I saw her body broken
on the delivery room
rack,
so never
make her weep
as I have at times.
I've loved her fifteen hundred lives over
though I've known
her only in brief.
If you honor her as I do
she will
sustain your
heart
though Hell itself
rise against you.

But you see,
it is not only she and me,
the Rose and the thorn
who watch over you
in slumber, strife,
night frights
and workaday
weeks.
You are guarded by a host of
heroes valiant
and brave.
Older foes than I have met
they vanquished
in times forgotten,
a thousand airy
dragon
phantoms
they slew and set me back
to sleep,
for I, too, once slumbered
as a suckling babe
while someone else whispered
sentinel
above me.

I was not always strong
nor will I always be.
I only pray that you will keep the
sleep of your
precious ones
as I do,
and they did,
my Son,
in love's own trusted
Time.