By: Alfred Fournier
Upbeat band swings joy
from kitchen radio.
Father watches, unobserved,
mother’s shadow, dancing,
elegant and slim, across the Frigidaire.
Young again, before the kids.
He’s been all day plotting flowers,
tender humored charms of unwavering sun.
Close as he can come
to poems to show his love.
Leaning on the doorframe, says, “it’s time
I take you dancing,” pulling
flowers from his back.
Her tiptoe smile, flirty glance
enough to last him decades
after she’s gone.
Alfred Fournier is an incomplete project and student of life and poetry residing in Phoenix, Arizona. He is an entomologist at University of Arizona and graduate of Purdue and George Washington Universities. He recently began submitting poetry for publication.
"This poem is sort of an autobiographical daydream. My parents had eight kids. Mom was tall, elegant. She died relatively young, when I was a child. I closed my eyes and wondered what it must have been like in their early days together. At first, all I could see was her shadow, but I felt the joy that must have pulsed through them, the closeness. I wanted to express the way her spirit had lasted, the way a single moment can push across boundaries of time and death, and just keep dancing."
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