FATHER’S DAY POEM

A young man only twenty-two couldn’t cope with things,
so he jumped to his death from the ninth floor of a hospital...
the place where his mother works caring for distressed people...
and the very place where he was born... swell the organ...
dramatic irony... Shakespeare would have liked it
for all kinds of reasons... Maybe it’s true or maybe it’s not.
Oh, his death is real all right...why he was born is the question.
Does it matter?

The National Geographic mother elephant in still water
with her trunk around her baby, and the mother terrier
lying with eyes half closed in contentment as her pups
suckle, and the duck shepherding her brood through traffic
and my mother dove perched on the edge of the nest...
All are mothering by instinct which obviously works better
for dogs, birds and gigantic mammals than for some people.
Does it matter?

They huddle together in the nest now too small,
the mother dove and her two fledglings waiting to fly
off to their own lives apart from her and from the nest
outside my window, the only home they’ve known.
Today is Father’s Day and I can’t help but notice
the father dove has been noticeably absent lately.
Who cares, I wonder. Does she? Do the youngsters?
Does it matter?