My name is Podrigo Tumor and one of the things I love about poetry is that it can be

in a single poem like a marriage between unexpected things, marriage between the living

and the dead or the marriage between hope and brutal reality or the marriage between

friendship and the griefs, the friendships carry.

And it doesn't try to resolve it as it has to be one thing or the other poetry can say

it can be a few things together and these unexpected marriages.

After the ghost that rolls like the God of Geese by Martin this father, this poem has

an epigraph from William Blake. Everything that lives is holy.

After the phone call about my father far away, after the next day flight cancelled by

the blizzard, after the last words left unsaid between us, after the harvest of the organs

at the morgue, after the mortuary and cremation of the body, after the box of ashes shipped

to my door by mail, after the memorial service for him in Brooklyn, I said, I want to feed

the birds. I want to feed bread to the birds. I want to feed bread to the birds at the

park. After the walk around the pond and the war memorial, after the signs at every

step that read, do not feed the geese, after the goose that rolls from the water like the

God of Geese, after the goose that shrieked like a demon from the hell of geese, after

the goose that scattered the creatures smaller than geese, after the heartbeat, the wild

mouth taking bread from my hand, there was quiet in my head. No cacophony of the dead

lost in the catechons, no mosquito hum of condolences. Only the next offering of bread

raised up in my open hand, the bread warm on the table of my truce with the world.

I love the accumulated nature of this poem, the twelve times that the word after is used,

it builds and it builds and it builds and you wonder what's going to happen. It's

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