The author of the Poem for the Day

wrote of a guilty remembrance from

his childhood involving death. The

reader felt a pang of lingering and

 

still lively guilt. For the reader, it

was about being afraid of the un-

known and confusion over death

and innocently saying the wrong

 

thing at the wrong time and every-

one freezing in time in the reader’s

frozen folder of – the poet called it

gaffes. Then as the memory thawed

 

the reader felt the chill of that exact

moment in the family car as his dad

pulled up to the curb in front of the

funeral parlor to view the lifeless

 

(what did that mean to the boy?)

body of the beautiful, young mother

whose son sat in the front seat and

the reader as a young boy sat in

 

the back, who just as the engine was

turned off and the doors were about

to open and not knowing anything

about death and wondering if the

 

son’s young mother was still the

beautiful woman the boy had a

crush on and going into a panic

blurted out in song to the son,

 

“Your mother is dead; no, she’s

alive; no, she’s dead or is she

alive?” There was the huge suck-

ing noise of a gasp in the car from

 

the man’s mother and father and

everything and everybody froze

in time and then the son began to

cry and the man reading the Poem

 

for the Day all those years later

winced loudly enough for his

wife to ask, “Is everything all

right, dear?”