D-Day 1994

for my father

Even after fifty years you still see them,
bodies exploding to your left and right,
a head, an arm severed. You see them
as you sleep alone in your bed, my mother
now dead, too. And when I call you to say
we’re thinking of going to Normandy, you reply
“Why? There’s nothing to see there,” and when
I ask if you will come too, you say, “No,
I will not go back.”

I should have remembered

my mother saying there were nights you would
wake shaking in bed, how she would hold you
until the shaking stopped and you slept.
 
These days you are tender with plants
in your garden. You nurse them,
making sure young plants will grow.