A poem from the vault
Saturday morning & he walks down the stairs
Picks up the paper & he silently stares.
His little boy runs up, a face full of glee
“Daddy, come on play with me.
I wanna build castles on the shore in the sand.
I wanna slay dragons in some foreign land.
I want you to come play with me.”
His little boy fingers wrap tight on a sleeve
As he looks up at Daddy and he begs him “please.”
But Daddy is busy – no time for the boy.
He says he’ll play later but that’s just a ploy.
He takes it for granted there will always be time
To tell him the things that he knows in his mind.
“Tomorrow,” he swears, “we can dance or we’ll swing
Tomorrow’s the time we can do anything.”
The child looks hopeful. He smiles and says “fine.”
His little boy fingers let go of the sleeve
And the boy turns away, “Daddy, tomorrow, please.”
In a blink of an eye, tomorrow comes to an end.
A marriage is over with nothing to mend.
His wife says she’s leaving. She just cannot stay.
The boy will go with her; then, she takes him away.
The distance between them fills up the years
And he thinks of him always as he blinks back the tears
His memories haunt him to this very day
As he still feels the touch of a hand on his sleeve
And he still hears the cries of a boy saying “please.”
He hopes that someday his boy will come back
And he carries his loss like a weight in a sack
He doesn’t forget there are words never said
As “I love you, my son” rolls around in his head.
Soon, he promises, he’ll make things okay
And he falls to his knees – lets his pain slip away.
He thinks of tomorrow as he crawls into bed
Still, those little boy fingers don’t clutch at his sleeve
But he looks up to heaven and prays to God “please.”
Finalist in the 2002 USA Songwriting Competition in “Lyrics Only”
©2000/Virginia Lynn Emrick