Chicken Necks Poem by Kim Barney

When my father married my mother, he told her 'You have 21 years.'
She asked 'What do you mean? '
He said, 'Well, I'm 31 years old. My father died at 52, and I figure I'll go at about the same time, so that gives us 21 years together.'

When my grandmother (his mother)heard what he had said, she was very upset and told him: 'You shouldn't say things like that! They have a way of coming true! '

Twenty-one years later, my mother died of leukemia. She left my father a widower with six children. [See my poem 'Memories of Mother'.] Dad knew he needed help raising them, so after I'm not sure how much time, he tried to get back into the dating game. He was overweight, cranky and hard of hearing. How he ever managed to do it I don't know, but somehow he found my stepmother, a widow with four daughters, three of them already married.

They were married about two and a half years after my mother passed away, and were together for more than thirty years until Dad passed away at age 86. As I said in the poem, I really grew to love her, and probably shed just as many tears when she passed away as I did for my real parents.

01 December 2014
Recife, Brazil