Poetry by Darrell Petska

                        garann CC



When Something Terrible

After the shock,
after the sadness,
moonlight, find me,
wind, gather me,
sunlight, bathe me
until I’m other than I was--
new blood flowing,
new mind perceiving
a hidden way,
every sign reading “go,”
that terrible something
altered before me,
wearing a new face,
striding ahead,
my vanguard,
ready to cry, “steady on,
rough patch to clear
as you’ve done before:
darkness can’t hold.”

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Last Surviving Memories

“Hugh the wheeler-dealer,”
my father called him,

smoked, cursed,
punched my arm,
“Hey boy!”
slipped me a finger of whiskey
and a Camel cigarette--
age six.

Gave my mother a leather bag
he made at the TB sanitarium.

“Burned a lot of bridges,”
townspeople judged
at his sparsely attended wake.

“A sad, lonely man,”
my mother wept.

“Remember me,”
his hand-stitched bag,
the whiskey’s wallop begged.

Those last surviving memories
just turned the page on 70.

“Don’t forget. Don’t forget.”
Then a gust of wind comes,
bearing it all away.

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Darrell Petska is a retired communications editor, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Besides previously appearing in Anti-Heroin Chic, he has published in Muddy River Poetry Review, Chiron Review, Star 82 Review, Verse-Virtual and widely elsewhere (see conservancies.wordpress.com). Forty years a father (eight years a grandfather), and longer as a husband, Darrell lives outside Madison, Wisconsin.

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