As the wind picks up the cedar rocker
polished over generations by salt off
the sea pulses empty, sometimes slowly,
sometimes pumping back and forth.
Who has come from the dead to sit
a few minutes?

My father who dove in waves
before sunrise, my grandmother
so small and thin who had vinegar
and honey for breakfast, my uncle
who always won at gin?

The chair still,
then violent,
then calm.
I hope
I too
will visit.

©

Steven Luria Ablon, poet and adult and child psychoanalyst, teaches child psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and publishes widely in academic journals. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines such as The Brooklyn Review, Ploughshares, and The Princeton Arts Review. He has published five full collections of poetry including Tornado Weather (Mellen Poetry Press, 1993), Flying Over Tasmania (The Fithian Press, 1997), Blue Damsels (Peter E Randall Publisher, 2005), Night Call (Plain View Press, 2011), and, most recently, Dinner in the Garden (Columbia, South Carolina, 2018).