Scott Ferry

Inheritance

 
the worm my son calls a snake
escapes the son i was is now
one ghost and an escaped name

the son he will father i pray i will meet
before i am a ghost my mother will
soon escape her nameless body

my father is on a mountaintop as
soil in snow my son is so late
i can show him pictures

i can send my mother pictures
of my son my daughter but the names
escape into the frame

i don’t ask to escape i say
to my son let the worm stay
there in the soil he likes it there

the snake is something else
a lost molted thing i cannot
explain to my children

it was before all of this that my father
escaped and he cannot talk to you
or hold your shiny bodies

in his hands because he is soil
in snow but is a skinless
name not here but here

my mother sees him in her
static as a nameless warmth
in a nameless snow

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. He has been published in the American Journal of Poetry, The Night Heron Barks, Banyan Review, and New York Quarterly, among many others. His seventh book of poetry, The Long Blade of Days Ahead, is forthcoming from Impspired Press in August 2022.