Burial song, Fish’s Eddy

by Gerald McCarthy

Here, my name
becomes the sound of water
moving over shale
& as I look back
my wife recalls
the hard hours
of our life together
the years we struggled
to make ends meet —
& there was never an end.
My sons think my name
is father,
they see their own lives
stretched out — a white road
lined with wildflowers,
a song coming back —
wild rivers, islands of ginger flowers,
hibiscus, weeping lantana.
There are so many names
for grief
yet we know so little of joy
of the twisting way our lives take us —
until reaching up
we find a star-shaped flower
blossoming
where we thought the vine
would never bloom.