A Left-Over From Father's Day

****
A June Sunday

I know a man, his daughter doesn’t speak to him.
None of us knows why nor wants to even guess
Why this young girl would ever have left
A perfectly good father out in the rain,
Why she would jeer as he turns to rust.

It’s a lack of years plus all that impatient yearning
To be gone that makes them blind
To how the smallest choice is always still made
In the garden of forking paths, a glade
Deceptive in its many turnings.

Those of us without fathers are afraid to ask
If he’s for sale. Would she part with him rather
Than simply let him rust? But we know he can’t be given away
He can only be left or reclaimed — by her, undoing this sin—
This waste of a perfectly good father.