Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Thursday, February 24, 2011 9:19:12 PM
... I beg your indulgence and include the poem I wrote after my older brother John died in December of 1983. Jonah Goldberg have something in common ... we're both short a father and a brother. I didn't revere my brother the way I revered my father, but then John would have been disgusted with me if I had. He had a keen appreciation of his own worth in comparison with Dad, and it was the same as my evaluation of my own self-worth against that same towering target.
For John
I have a photograph I carry
A picture of my brother
The brother who I loved
The brother whose opinion meant so much to me
The brother who died
Almost 16 years ago
It hardly seems possible
And I miss him more than words can say
And I miss him every single day
When I look around my crowded apartment
Crowded with reminders of him gone away
So very long ago
I see his desk, his dresser, his Army trunk
His catcher’s mask
And they remind me of him
But they’re not him
And when he died it ripped a hole
A hole in my soul that never heals
A knife in my heart that’s forever twisting
And the blood flows fresh over its jagged blade
And I’ll never look on his face again in this world
I pray we’ll meet in the next
If there is one
When we were young, it seems like yesterday
Or a hundred years ago
My mother shot pictures, shot roll after roll
Or so it seemed
And we laughed at her for taking so many
For taking too many
But we were wrong
So horribly wrong
I have a photograph I carry
Just one
Isn’t it strange
We all thought
We all knew
That Mom was taking too many photographs
We never dreamed she was taking too few