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Jeffrey Harrison: Double Visitation

There I was with my father again alive
walking around the back yard together,
and I hardly noticed that it wasn’t our back yard
or that he looked like he was in his fifties.
We were laughing at something, joking around,
each comment making us laugh even harder.
But then he was crying and I didn’t know why,
his face contorted, unable to speak. I turned 
and hugged him and whispered in his ear
the words I wanted to say and he wanted to hear…
 
and as if I had uttered some magic formula
I found myself sitting in a movie theater
beside my suddenly alive again brother.
The movie ended, and as the credits rolled,
we both agreed that it was good. Then I said,
“But I think I fell asleep for part of it,” 
and started telling him the dream I’d had,
how our father had visited from the dead,
and what I’d done—and, to show him, did again,
whispering those same words to my brother.

Jeffrey Harrison’s latest collection is Between Lakes (Four Way Books, 2020).

Double Visitation from Between Lakes copyright 2020 by Jeffrey Harrison.  Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.

3 comments on “Jeffrey Harrison: Double Visitation

  1. Carole Brooks Platt
    September 29, 2020

    Beautiful and heartfelt! I was very moved. I also noted your pronounced left brow line, indicating right-hemispheric dominance, a sign of your sensitivity.

    Liked by 2 people

  2. Barbara Huntington
    September 29, 2020

    I have those dreams, sometimes happy, sometimes not. I prefer yours. Thank you for your uplifting poem.

    Liked by 2 people

  3. loranneke
    September 29, 2020

    Oh how the dead haunt us — this is a beautiful poem!!!!

    Liked by 1 person

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This entry was posted on September 29, 2020 by in Poetry, spirituality and tagged , , , .

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