Benediction

As soon as I saw this picture, I called it "Benediction."

I wasn't in Utah on this visit and could not have taken it, but someone sent it to me.

I don't know who took this photo of

 my two sisters and my youngest brother, Robert, with our mother.

Robert died in 1997 and Mom in 2002, but Marjory and Susan are still going strong.

Robert liked poetry and understood my poems, which was a wonderful thing!

DUCK-CHASING

I spied a very small brown duck

Riding the swells of the sea

Like a rocking-chair. "Little duck!"

I cried. It paddled away,

I paddled after it. When it dived,

Down I dived: too smoky was the sea,

We were lost. It surfaced

In the west, I torpedoed west

And when it dived, I dived,

And we were lost and lost and lost

In the slant smoke of the sea.

When I came floating up on it

From the side, like a deadman,

And yelled suddenly, it took off,

It skimmed the swells as it ascended,

Brown wings burning and flashing

In the sun as the sea it rose over

Burned and flashed underneath it.

I did not see the little duck again.

Duck-chasing is a game like any game.

When it is over it is all over.

Galway Kinnell

(1927-2014)

The Voice That Is Great Within Us; 

American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, 

edited by Hayden Carruth, Bantam, 1970, pages 599.

I think these are my favorite lines in the poem, but I also like " lost and lost and lost"
Brown wings burning and flashing

In the sun as the sea it rose over

Burned and flashed underneath it.