Tribute Poem by Laurence Overmire

My Father stands tall in my mind
You’d never know he was half-crippled
Stricken by polio in his younger days
Never mentioned it
Though it must have been painful
Pain was just something you had to get through
“Don’t fret the small stuff, ” my Dad would say.

Perhaps he knew something we didn’t know
Saw his best friend laid out on the deck of a ship
Flag-draped corpses to litter the sea
Nineteen Forty-Five it was
Kamikaze flyers burst out of the sun
Exploded in fire
Torpedoed their honor in a final desperate sacrifice
To some un-holy God
The burning Bunker Hill
Lit like a funeral pyre upon a Viking sea
And young Dad, in the blackened decks below
Gasped for short life’s breath
A coffee soaked rag
Pressed to his lips
Made his way through the dark, twisted bowels of the ship
Past the screaming souls of the unlucky many
Till day’s light opened in sky before him…
Taps never sounds
So sad a note
As to a survivor
Who cannot fathom his sentence to life
When his brave comrades lie unjustly charged
To death and the cold sea
And had but the hand of the fatal clock been just a
Tick or two off
He might have been where they were.

Yeah my Dad was the kind of guy who’d stop and
Help a motorist at the side of a road
Or if he found a dollar just sitting on the floor
It wouldn’t go into his pocket, but straight to Lost and
Found
He never made much money, never had a Cadillac
I guess he believed in something else, something kind of
Hard to buy
A life of the mind and the spirit
Understanding among men
All races, all creeds
Working, building
Together.

Some men build mansions ornamented gold
Some build monuments, proud testament to fame
And some men build much smaller things
Things you cannot touch or see
Like honor, justice, integrity
And love.

Yet these things I have felt and seen
Passed in wisdom from father to son
And I only hope my children’s children
Shall find the same in me.


(Previously published by The Penwood Review, Vol.3, No.2, Fall '99; Honor and Remembrance, Indelible Mark Publishing,2007)