Mom and Dad

Here are two poems I wrote about my mother and father. The first is one I wrote while at the Red River Valley Writers Project at UND. I was able to give it to Mom before she died that summer. I also read it at her funeral. Out of all the many things I'm thankful for, chief among them is her reading this and then telling me, as I left the room, "I love you." Those were the last words she ever said to me. She died the next night.

A child is a ball of clay -
blank, innocent, impressionable, lost.

The mother is the artist -
creating, molding, correcting, affecting.

Sometimes, as can happen, the creation defies the creator. The clay slips through the
fingers, droops back into nothingness, crumbles to bits and pieces.

But most times, the creation becomes an extension of the creator. The clay takes the
intended dimensions, bends at the proper angles, holds the desired forms.

As a ball of clay over the years,

My mother’s hands have shaped me . . .

bathing me in the cold white kitchen sink and rubbing away the dirt and kneading away the chill.

checking my damp forehead for fever in bed as I thought the overhead light was going to fall on me.

cradling a Snoopy book and sifting through the pages as I struggled to enunciate the words.

supporting me as I stumbled and jerked in the front yard as I sought to relearn how to walk after my fractured ankle.

praising me as she clapped and cheered at so many of my games, whether I ever saw the field or not.

healing as she picked shards of glass from my ear lobe and daubed blood from my scalp after my car accident.

inspiring me as she cradled the phone back home and told me “when life hands you lemons, make lemonade” when I was distraught about finding housing at BSU.


A creation scientist somewhere once wrote that when you look past our cells, atoms, and
DNA, you will find the fingerprints of God.

If you were to break me down memory by memory, emotion by emotion,
chromosome by chromosome, you would find the same - the fingerprints of my mother.


This is a poem I wrote about my father. In 1994 he had heart surgery. The nurse was teaching him how to check his pulse; however, he couldn't feel it. Turns out the nerves on the tips of his fingers were dead from working outside so many years. I thought that image was ironic and wrote the following poem.

Fingertips


Dad's pulse has disappeared.
Or so he concludes.
His workman fingers pick and pinch
the awkward area
beneath his wrist.

His weathered fingers are accustom to
picking rock, tossing bails, weilding wrenches,
cluthing lambs, brandishing hammers, driving a John Deere.
Still his worn fingers poke and prod
determined to either deduce
the hidden rhythm
or drub it out.

My fingers coddle and caress
and instantly discover the
determined beat
in its traditional place
just beneath the flesh.

But for Dad's workman fingers, his pulse has disappeared.
Defiantly, he declares it a mystery.
The doctor, though, decides it's a tactile irony:
his life beats against
dead fingertips.