My Old Man Poem by Samuel Santana

Within a humble coffin,
purchased with collected coins,
was the already worn face of my father.
Beside him I lived half century of sufferings.
His days were a hoe,
a machete,
the Sun,
the rain,
the cold,
thirst and nakedness.
The bread always ran to him.
In his old age,
and under the orange tree in the courtyard,
he was sitting watching the dust of the road,
as if he waiting for something.
With the branch of a tree, he makes a rustic cane
when his sight began to fail.
But one morning I found him staggering
in the middle of a mud ditch full of yellowish water.
It was my mother who,
welling tears, closed his eyes in a winter morning
when he left this world.
At his death I breathed deep:
' No more anguish.'
On this earth,
there is nothing as sad as a death
without having lived.