You are old now,
white-haired, stick in one hand.
Your black-business-suited son
speaks to you earnestly
of stocks and shares and mortgage rates.
You do not care.
You have run life’s race.
You try to pay
polite attention;
you dream, however,
of when he was a child
playing with toy trains,
building houses out of Lego blocks,
and you laughed together.
It seems not so long ago,
“Only yesterday, ” you would say, if asked,
though in fact yesterday
was just another trip like this
to a loveless city of black-business-suited men
dealing in stocks and shares and mortgage rates,
where your son now plays the stock market
and with gilt-edged securities
with his respectable colleagues
who smile politely over business lunches
to insure themselves against life.
“He was a good boy, ” you think dreamily,
“always polite to his mother and to me;
good at his lessons, never played up,
never wagged school like other boys,
never threw his toys in a fit of temper.
Now he has a good career,
and that is as it should be,
for him and for me -
it is what we have earned.”
And a sigh escapes you into the air,
but he does not notice.
You stare out of the window
of the train which takes you both onwards.
“No doubt, ” you tell yourself,
“he will mourn me properly,
black-suited and suitably solemn,
when I am gone.”
I love the portayal. It is diverse and fresh. The thoughts between father and son, and the old man reminiscing for times past long ago. Diversity is what keeps poetry fresh. This has it in abundance Great Write Steve
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
It is joy to find a writer on this site whose poems seem ALL to be worth a look. This is such a poignant picture of a situation I am starting to find myself in - asking for details and then not understanding or forgetting the answer! I have added this one to my favourites list.