Lake Superior, Marquette, Michigan, 1985

This is a poem that I wrote in 1999 about my father's drowning and my 14-year-old brother’s terrible time trying to save him.  It's a Shakespearean sonnet.

Blueness fades as memories rearrange

And murmur of a father’s fateful luck.

Deliberate work-worn hands now blue as veins;

No chafing will unseize their frozen lock.

His lot was introduced to that cold date

Of timely men, who swim into their door

Through aqua blue marine, paternal fate

No human power’s able to ignore.

One Earthly sun dove deep to fight the tide,

Where desperate hands held hair, then arms, then naught.

With blackness, empty starving lungs replied,

And son lay gasping on the shore—his hours bought.

Superior lake, my father’s rendezvous;

Vacations drowned into a paler blue.

© 1999 David W. Weimer

Born to Wonder upcoming book excerpt

When I got to the bottom of the escalator at the airport in Detroit, Gino's dad, who never spoke much to me at all except in short, few-word, broken English phrases from around hand-rolled cigarettes, and who intimidated the hell out of me, took a step forward and grabbed me in a bear hug.  I stood there.  After a moment, I tried to back away, but he kept me in that tough, no words embrace.  He looked me in the eyes intensely and then did that.  He didn't say anything.  I didn't say anything either.  That's what I remember about coming back for the funeral.