THE SCENE

     for my father on his 65^th wedding anniversary

We all have one.

A scene we revisit

The day my men and I,

nearly 300 of us in total, landed

in Thule, Greenland,

time and time again.

A story, a memory

after our six month assignment

of unloading a navy cargo vessel,

just forty miles shy of the North Pole,

we keep telling

because imbedded within it

who did I see on the dock

alongside the military band

the captain had ordered

is a message we desperately

need to hear:

to greet us but your mother.

The only woman on the dock.

All the way from California.

that we are loveable.

We tell it to anyone

I was literally and figuratively then

on top of the world. And more revered

than I had been the whole six months prior,

who will listen. Year

after year. And the older  

‘cause she was waving at me, her 

 husband, the commanding officer, a man 

barley twenty-one, and still newly wed.

we get, the more we tell it,

because we need to tell it.