Lost Poem

for Victor Hebert

The last time we talked was days before Christmas.

You had remarried and business was doing well. 

Looking like a Black Santa with your round belly, 

burly beard, and big gap-tooth smile, you bore 

an armload of gifts for Narva, the kids, and me.

In your thirty nine years, you gave me that one gift,

unboxed, poorly wrapped, and without a bow, 

so small that I placed it on a shelf above my dresser.

One July morning I got a call saying you had 

a massive, fatal heart attack, the way your father,

my grandfather, had fallen fifteen years before. 

In days that followed, a part of me left this world.

A song, “The Rose” by Bette Midler, kept me 

from overdosing or putting a bullet in my head.

I looked above my dresser mirror and found 

a handkerchief inside a tiny, unopened package. 

Streaming tears, I recalled the Christmas Eves 

we stood in long lines with other poor children 

to get candy and toys from Sheriff Deputies, 

not knowing we were poor. I wrote my first poem, 

not thinking it was a poem. In time, I lost those 

feeling words and never tried to rewrite them, 

until thirty years later, as I gaze into an abyss 

and see them by the firelight of your good heart.



Originally published in MockingHeart Review