Geffrey Davis
Son: I stayed spooning your mother’s
softly snoring form, as she swelled with you,
month after month. Your voice pierced
the Seattle spring air, and I began to wake
in the early hours, before work, my mind
and body dragged from that other-worldly
cavern of sleep, to watch you flexing your life.
I biked three miles home on lunch breaks
to bottle feed you, begged your mother
to make you wait. Stop turning these details
toward a genesis for a lifetime of hanging on.
I showed you what the living can do
and call love—that a man can rise, coughing
from the ashes of himself,
and go back down again, like prayer.