Why Not?

An angry man raised his voice
in front of my new wife.
“Don’t want to talk about it.”
Why not?
“What’s the sense of talking about the past?
What’s done is done.”
I only asked my father to tell me about his father.
Only.
All I knew told once:
“He escaped the czarist draft.”
And this:
My father was late for school.
He told the teacher:
“I had to go to court.
My folks got divorced today.”
My grandfather. I met him.
Once.
He lived far away.
California.
The Wonderful World of Disney.
I saw it on T.V.
My favorite was Frontier Land.
Davy Crockett.
I had a coonskin cap.
My grandfather. He had cancer.
He came to us in Boston.
He went to the hospital.
Then our house. Now one-armed.
He showed me Soviet Life. Looked like Life magazine.
“A good country,” he said. “Good to workers.”
He died in California.

Twenty years later,
I only asked my father to tell me about his father.
“Don’t want to talk about it,”
Why not?
“What’s the sense of talking about the past?”

by Neal Whitman

Neal Whitman was a teacher in his paid profession, but now his non-paying profession is poetry. Over the past four years, he has published more than sixty poems in journals such as MacGuffin, Vermont Literary Review, Avocet, Pedestal Magazine, Magnapoets among more than twenty others. He lives in Pacific Grove, California, and in nearby Carmel is a volunteer docent at the Robinson Jeffers Tor House. He has been a guest poet at the Sacramento Poetry Center and next year will be the “Third Thursday” guest poet in Point Arena, California. Neal writes a monthly feature, “Poetry Prof,” for the online journal, Getting Something Read and is an editor for Pulse, a medical humanities journal. He also has published poetry in the International Journal of Healthcare and Humanities. The two haiku that appear on page 132 in the print version of The Taylor Trust Volume 4 were awarded honorable mention in the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society 2009 contest judged by two haiku masters in Japan.