At my Grandson’s Baseball Tournament in Myrtle Beach
We have come here before the first game
for breakfast to the famous Waffle House
teeming with families patiently waiting
with small children as the grills heat up,
and workers whir around tables.
My pleasure this morning is breakfast
with my daughter during her divorce.
She says these are the thinnest
best waffles she’s ever had.
I agree. We go every morning.
She thought her marriage would
never collapse, He wouldn’t beat
their son, have an affair, say he hated her,
complain that her work as a novelist
brought in little money. She wasn’t
slim enough. She blames herself.
Her life is sorrowful. She is as lonely
as a dog left by highway.
I wish I could take her back to her childhood.
I wish I could take her for waffles every day.
*
Steven Luria Ablon, poet and adult and child psychoanalyst, teaches child psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and publishes widely in academic journals. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines such as The Brooklyn Review, Ploughshares, and The Princeton Arts Review. He has published five full collections of poetry including Tornado Weather (Mellen Poetry Press, 1993), Flying Over Tasmania (The Fithian Press, 1997), Blue Damsels (Peter E Randall Publisher, 2005), Night Call (Plain View Press, 2011), and, most recently, Dinner in the Garden (Columbia, South Carolina, 2018).
