Scene with sons at the dinner table

April is National Poetry Month! I aim to post a poem each weekday in celebration of the form. Some old, some new, some published, some never-before-seen.

As I mentioned in a previous post, poetry is everywhere. As I mentioned in another previous post, I am a childless pug-papa, but I have three nephews and two nieces, ranging in age from 3 to 24. I am grateful that over the past few years, I am proximally closer to my parents and to one of my sisters and her family. On one of my recent trips to visit them, I witnessed what is described in the poem below. A brief moment, but a moment that made my heart melt. A moment of love—in as much as men in our society can and do show love.

The original title for this poem was “My nephew feeds a cucumber slice to his grandpa” but it was too convoluted, too hard to follow. In revision, I simplified it by changing the name of my nephew and adjusting the relationship of the speaker (poet’s voice) as the father—observing the actions of the generation before him and the generation after him.

This is also one of my recent favorites, never before published online or elsewhere, but a poem which I read at my first-ever poetry reading at the Cannon Falls VFW last autumn.

Scene with sons at the dinner table


After his seventh or eighth shake 
of salt onto the cucumber medallions
which I have laid before my boy, 
I plead with Grayson not to eat them.
Too much salt is like, really bad for you, bud.
His eyes flip, moan, tackle mine: 
Conor McGregor hammerfisting Dr Phil.

I think of my co-worker Bob, 
my age, and on a mandatory low
sodium diet, courtesy of his cardiologist.
I think of Grampa, 
an eighth-grade grad, who
as a farmboy during the Depression, 
ate lard sandwiches for supper—
that porky paste under his French tongue—
and succumbed to his second heart attack. 

I think of Dad, aged 79, 
whose open-heart surgery 
and twice-grafted aortic aneurysms
haven’t slowed the pace
at which he cooks and consumes 
pot roast, meatloaf, bacon-wrapped bacon;
who, for as long as I can recall
has sprinkled salt into cans of Hamm’s,
canned ham, tomatoes,
flesh of watermelon. 

And Grayson, sitting in his usual place 
at Dad’s elbow
looks up at him, laughter boiling 
in the teapots of his eyes, as 
he dresses his dinner in a crystalline sweater.

Dad, distracting him with the guillotine chokehold
flashing from his forty-inch console TV,
taps the cucumber slice once, 
like an ashy cigarette, against the lip 
of Grayson’s Darth Vader dinner plate,
and eats it himself.