My Father, Edgar
Edgar was the middle son
and he was a bull.
In youth he swerved very early
and took up the father's likeness,
and learned to drink and love women
And learned the street and how
to make money.
He was young and fierce,
and feared none in the fray
for he was fast to win
over beast or man.
A friend with a good laugh,
an enemy with heavy hand
yet in his vices was his
life lost,
and his doom with his
hands wrought.
How Marie his old good mother
used to wait for him night after night
as he was out,
and how late was his sorrow and love
when she finally came to die.
He married a young sweetheart
of town beauty. and they fell in love.
She was named Helena, and had white arms
and lovely curls.
He was too brath a lover
for her tenderness
for so often did he hurt
her heart
and nested in other arms.
But Helena bore him two sons.
and he was but loving at whiles,
yet what his heart longed for
was something else.
In three years Ariel, come of age,
chanced to leave father and go with mother,
but Jesus had married young and now had a family,
and Edgar was left alone in that house, with years to pass
he remembered the joys where he was now bitter and weary
and struck the walls and cursed the day, and drank himself numb
and cried, for what he had lost,
and what he had become.
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