This next one is called "Late in the Millennium."
I see something here.
I see when I was little my father made
me recite a book a month.
And someone asked me, is that true?
And in fact, it was.
When I was very little, he used to do this beautiful thing.
He would pull a chair up to his desk.
He would take like two or three dictionaries,
put it on the chair, and he'd lift me on top of it.
And he would open this huge rotten Bible, the King James,
and he would make me read from it.
And he would unwrap these butterscotch drops
and pop them in my mouth.
And I would have to read out loud doing this.
And I remember if I read something wrong, he would say,
what?
And I'd be terrified.
I was terrified of the man who gave me a butterscotch drop.
But he called it sweet learning.
And so he would make me do this over and over
again until I had certain passages, entire books
of the Bible memorized.
It has to do with that.
He was a scholar, I am not.
It's called "Late in the Millennium."
"My father in Heaven is reading out
loud to himself, Psalms or news.
Now he ponders what he's read.
No, he's listening for the sound of children in the yard.
Was that laughing or crying?
So much depends upon the answer.
For either, he will go on reading
or he'll run to save a child's day from grief.
As it is in heaven, so it was on earth.
Because my father walked the earth
with a grave, determined rhythm, my shoulders
ached from his gaze.
Because my father's shoulders ached from the pulling of oars,
my life now moves with a powerful back and forth
rhythm, nostalgia, speculation.
Because he made me recite a book a month,
I forget everything as soon as I read it
and knowledge never comes.
But while I'm mid stride a flight of stairs
or lost a moment, on some avenue,
a remarkable disappointment to him.
I am like anyone who arrives late in the millennium
and is unable to stay to the end of days.
The world's beginnings are obscure to me.
Its outcomes inaccessible.
I don't understand the source of starlight or starlight's
destinations.
And already another year slides out of balance.
But I don't disparage scholars, my father was one,
and I loved him.
Who packed his books once and all of our belongings,
then sat down to await instruction from his God,
yes, but also from a radio.
At the doorway I watched, and I suddenly
knew he was one like me who got my learning under a lentil.
He was one of the powerless to whom knowledge
came while he sat among suitcases,
boxes, old newspapers, string.
He did not decide peace or war, home or exile, escape by land
or escape by sea.
He waited merely as always someone waits far, near, here,
hereafter, to find out is it praise or lament hidden
in the next moment."