A Poem about My Father ("What The Story Was")

Forgive me: it is a Monday; it is August; I am back at the office picking up material for a teacher who will not be here to teach on Friday and asked me to pick up the class for her.  I have been reading over her notes and I think I can follow what she wants me to do, but I still have questions.  My mind is not really on being that creative with this blog.  But I do have something brewing that I have put off for too long.

This may be the start of a whole series of poems about my father and his death.  I have a lot of rough work in a lot of different notebooks which I have filled up over the years and I think now is the right time to share them, starting with this sonnet.  I will try to publish them (I have self-published one collection of poetry), but I would like some feedback here.  Be honest and be fair...

What the Story Was







Maybe I was dreaming before the service, the earlier sitting


for a wake still in my mind. All of the guests (very Catholic)


would not weep from their seats. They were just “Amen”-ing


under their breaths, undulating with their fans, and sick


with the urge to leave the room, with a quick


gesture of hands on hearts, chests held tight.


And the mass became a mystery, a magic trick


of disappearing words (the priest spoke Latin), light


in multicolored ecstasy, and the red flight


of hibiscus (satin in my hands). I should have written


it all down from that very moment; the bitterness and bite


of knowing so little about where the body was burdened


with the quick neatness of a plaque, cement and lime.


There was more than this end of the rhyme.