Soon
        'For each man alike is oppressed by his own trouble,
        but the heart recovers quickly from someone else's grief.' Pindar, Nemean Ode, 1

A dozen years—one for each tribe,
month, apostle—are minutes for the wounded lost.
No Joseph triumphed, no chalice buried in the crib.
A blurring in life's sand storm, at best.
In his father's arms when I last saw him, three
days before he was forgotten in a hot car.
A prism of promise, alert, strong, and free
from the premonition I hushed. Now a scar
in a family's weight of life, he grows in dreamt
stages: a vane of puberty at present, soon
a man stormed by lust, a completion confirmed
by necessary fiction. In the novel in which he blooms,
he will find his path, study and become.
He'll weep by his parents' graves when their time comes.

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Copyright © 2021 Ricardo Pau-Llosa All rights reserved
from Birmingham Poetry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission