MIRROR IMAGES

Another birthday has arrived and I’m waiting here to greet it. Birthdays seem to turn up with alarming frequency the older I become but the only alternative is to die young and I’m far too old for that. 

A FATHER’S REFLECTION

In my shaving mirror, increasingly,
as I grow old, my father’s face
replaces mine. As I erase
the moisture, he stares back at me.
Map-lines, into his features drawn,
are duplicated in mine now
like signatures on cheek and brow:
all vestiges of youth have gone.
So here I stand, the mirror a lake.
He signals from his distant isle:
a loving wave, a gentle smile.
Thirty years past, yet still the ache
of loss lingers. He is long dead
and yet some hint of him remains
within me, in DNA chains:
a psychic fingerprint, a thread
that links the parent to the child
then spins out onward, onward still
to my child, her children. Such skill:
each life unique yet each profiled
to the shape of its begetter.
So something of my father stays
forever in my looks and ways,
perhaps for worse, perhaps better.
Our immortality exists
within our offspring: they transport
our essence forward, teleport
us through the future’s swirling mists.
The bristle on my jaw is braille.
its message clear in words, sublime:
like frogspawn in the pond of Time,
souls will survive, though bodies fail.