Bethesda Fountain Poem

My wife at rest

Grandma Qin stirring herbs stealthily

I sneak out to a favorite haunt,

a nearby public college

I sit on a concrete wall

sip dark coffee and munch a cinnamon bun

The students and hospital workers debowel the subway

The office workers run for the bus

I absorb all this early energy with glee

I don’t know why

I stroll through Central Park quiet on this gentle day

I get to the overlook of Bethesda fountain

It is the kind of day Grandma Qin came to America for

Cool, crisp, blue, green, with sunlight slowly encasing the canopy of oak trees,

evergreens, willows, wild flowers and shrubs and crew cut fields of grass

The land juts into the pea green lake of reflecting glass

Dogs run free sniffing and barking happily

A Sino-newbie Tai Chi’s on a spot of sun broken through the trees

It is silent, cool, dry

I stare at the cut at the edge of the lake

where punts could rest

and where I stood daily twenty-five years ago

reciting the Lord’s prayer as I recovered from a near fatal disease

Since then the park

where my father roamed as an orphaned ragamuffin,

has been my Cathedral

-- James M. McMahon