The Hunger. {poetry}
{source}
Silent morning crashed
by knuckled knocking,
“Do you want breakfast?”
he asks like clockwork.
A man who eats to fuel
his quest for the next meal.
I remember the
bed-and-breakfast crawl
we made visiting New England
in late fall of the festival trees,
the first snow of Vermont
outside a barn-turned pub.
The magic peppered with
the strafing questions like,
“Do you want pizza?
Are we getting soft serve?”
And we just finished breakfast
not even an hour ago.
We laughed and sighed
heavily too mocking the man.
Mom was herself then
and could join in the jeering.
This man she married from birth,
delivering herself too.
Broken windows,
airless in vomitous heat
of rat breath,
this sweatshop he worked in
nearly all of his adulthood,
feeding too many mouths
that barely spoke to his image.
He convinced himself
from so fateful a day — stay boxed,
when only he tripped
on the rug pulled
under his feet
by friends joy riding days
to sweet steals,
jobs or dying.
A mind goes empty
in the cabin of fear
dank and dark,
communing with
foreign tongues,
solemn shells of skin.
Like solitary confinement
for 48 years,
no one remains.
So we dwell on the asking,
the feeding, breaking bread,
we two who watch
our center fold in
on herself slowly,
eeking death out slow-steady
for lack of a conversation.
“No, I already ate,”
he hears expectantly
but undaunted.
“Come on. You’re too skinny
and you need to eat more.”
Words endlessly cut and pasted
on a screen of our lives.
Other words fly
scatter shot red-orange
like those trees,
the ones in New Hampshire,
that year we traveled miles
from my rage-ful grimace,
head banging steering wheel.
Remind me of a father’s daughter
teetered on seesaws,
lifted by the weighted desire
dreamed in obedient love,
and grounded earth bound
to shackled birthright chains.
Invisible strands heated like electric coils
of metallic sin knit our knotted ties,
seemingly eternal yet dust shallow
as we journey the branches
we are and make complete.
The insatiable consumption of air
heats the moving parts,
wills an engine movement
to carry bodies across lands,
upon which fathers and daughters
feed the mime of time.
*****
Pamela Gerber is a college Instructor of English Composition, writer and blogger, who practices Yoga and teenager-parenting in Huntington Beach, California.
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