I Tell My Son Last Kiss
His dry lips touch mine. He murmurs the story
about a lost shadow, a clock and crocodile.
He points to the ceiling, traces the sticker stars:
this star his, that star mine. I tell him last kiss.
Tonight, stone-carved newsmen stand in front of a school.
Every mother with a child in the bathtub or a child eating
leftover pizza feels the bang: a child’s cold bed,
a child’s folded pajamas, a child’s dry toothbrush.
Lock my love in your brain, I whisper. My son turns
an invisible key near his ear. He tongues click click.
I hear a rhythm sounding out from his bedroom:
not breath or heart, like God only more real,
more flesh, the sound of us all tumbling
toward some precipice together, the mothers,
the shooters, and all our sleeping children.
3 replies on “I Tell My Son Last Kiss”
That was outstanding. Proud of you!
Beautiful. Thank you.
An intimate and terribly real poem for our time. Love the movement from Peter Pan, the children who die by gunfire, never having the chance to grow up, and the way we try to keep our children safe without alarming them. Of course, when they go to school and have lockdown drills, there’s no way around the terror. But this child has, for now, a sweet and safe home, and the only fears are fictional. And for the mother–such a beautiful two-line stanza in the middle–that last moment before a night’s sleep, not what could come to pass in this time, which acquires physicality in the last stanza. Thanks, Allison!