The Gulls Make Me Think Of You Poem by Allan Thorne

We were a family
Of few traditions
They had been left
Back there
In that rural paradise
When my parents
Were evicted,
Cast out to make there way
In the cold industrial
Indifference of the city.

So when my father died
No one knew what to do.
He had insurance
That paid for cremation
So cremated he was
Even though he had
In his latter years
Returned the church,
The church of his boyhood,
And would have
Preferred to be buried.
Facing Jerusalem
Ready to arise,
Whole in body and soul
On Judgment Day
To meet his maker.

When we picked him up
At the funeral parlor
He fit neatly in a shoe box.
The box sat on my sisters
Coffee table for three years
Until one day,
grieving done,
She took it with her
Out on a sail boat
And dropped it into the sea.

For myself
I would have been content
To keep the box on the coffee table
And in the fullness of time
Add my own to box to the collection
To be cared for by my children.

But the dead are
At the mercy of the living.
In these matters.
And the living will do what is convenient
In the end.

My father comes to me now
In my dreams
More gentle than he was in life.
When I see a seagull
Circling in an updraft
I think of him.