At 71 and a Month

By D.R. James

PROMPT—Never will I forget ...

Early morning, awakened

from a dream of hugging

my young youngest son

so tightly it remained until

I could defog to "He’s a man,"

and that sorrow lingered

like a heady melancholy

hurtling me backward

toward the innocent errors

of my life and of my parents’

and their parents’ lives, etc.,

to seek the undiscoverable

sources, all the inheritances

of the ignorant generations,

natured, nurtured, and knitted

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D.R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press).