Father

I am half listening as he calls me down to dinner.

But the preciousness in his call always rings out to reach my ears.

He pokes his voice into the echoes of the long stairway and I can hear him shrinking.

The chords of his words take less from the silences now

As if the world has already heard all he has to say.

The fire in him,

Is now only a single glowing ember, quivering and threatening to blow out at the gust of a bad day.

He is tired most days.

But he still squeezes my hand just as tight when we pray at the table.

He is the defeated warrior who still loves what is true.

The cold rips through his days like flash floods of all the things he wants to forget.

He reminds me to write about lovely things like fire and San Francisco.

Sometimes he walks up slowly and wraps me in his arms

Like I am made of just sleepy summer vapors,

and the faint hush of a child on tip-toe,

Ready to slip away through his embrace like too many other things.

My own arms now return his stronghold and my hands lock around him as I rest in his warmth.

I hear my heart whisper then.

Telling him that he is still here,

Telling him that the world is not finished with him yet