My father died of a heart attack on April 26, 2001. He was on the golf course, his favorite hang-out. This poem was written as a tribute.

My father died today, so I suppose if I call myself “a writer,” then a poem is in order.

One photo I have places me back in the past, 1940, before the Japs bombed him and his buddies at Pearl.

He is smiling back at me, handsome, young, a new recruit from New London.
We are from British stock, my father and I, and we share a Piscean nature.
The ebb and flow of life’s rapids has shaken our smiles many times,
Alcoholism, divorce, “incomprehensible demoralization.”

But we young fight your wars because we see no Death until Death sees us:
Reflecting in the horror-stricken eyes of fallen comrades
In the sands of Iwo-Jima, on the streets behind a tavern, on a golf course of dreams,
Inside a harbor called “Pearl.”

Coincidences? There are none. Only connections.
My father’s mother was named “Pearl.”
Young men who die in war often call out to their mothers.
Mother is you, Universal, you who brings pain and birth, death and life, insanity and wisdom.

I choke back my tears, and remember:
I marched against the war (in Vietnam) when I got back from nowhere near Vietnam.
But I had been a sailor. Home from the sea. The sea, however, was in me.
And the pearl of sobriety was growing, ever-growing inside me.

My father and I were never really close. Are fathers and sons ever—if wars divide them?
However, we shared the boozy dreams of lovers of the sea, afraid to be.
Dad never had a father—just an old man who sired 24 children—but my father only saw the last dying vestiges of a drunk lying in his own excrement—which was his daily chore to clean. And he was forced to read to him from the Bible, every night, when the words meant nothing, and my father needed a father’s love—not a holy book’s dreams.

I talked to my son tonight. About his grandpa. About me. About being there for sons when they need to be close. We agreed we were different. Unlike my Dad and me.
Will my son stay sober? One day. We all are sober when we look into the face of our own mortality—seriously. We become sailors after pearls, on the waves of the Universe, seeking our mothers, ever reaching out for the flowing identities of manhood.

One day, young sailor, you shall be free!