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On The Night Of My First Breath

from Allegheny by Rodney DeCroo

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lyrics

On the night of my first breath in a delivery room
at Allegheny County General Hospital, my birth father
whom I will never meet is asleep on a bus

disappearing into the mid-west. His name is Frank
Houser. His jacket is crumpled between the side
of his face and the window. It is the 29th 

of December, but he dreams rain coming down
so hard, long strands strike the glass as if to shatter it.
My father’s hands are twitching in his lap

and when he looks down a sparrow is nesting
as if in the crook of a tree. Warmth like joy
fills my father’s body because

so delicate a creature has chosen him for safety.
He lightly strokes with the tip of a finger
the small brown head. The bird begins singing

into the darkness of the bus. Its high, sweet trilling
goes out among the sleeping passengers,
drawing each breath into its praise. My father

knows he is as much this song
as anything else in his life. When he looks outside
the rain has subsided into a blazing mist

lit red by the furnaces of steel mills along the river.
Upwards through the mist, against the darkness,
black smoke over the city like the sparrow’s notes,

traveling through my father’s hands into the night
of  this place that he is leaving. When he looks down again
his lap is empty. A woman nudges him awake

as the bus pulls into the Cleveland terminal.
Piles of plowed snow are crusted black
beneath the white lights of the empty parking lot.

He stares out the window, trying to remember
what he was dreaming. He is asked if he is getting off here
and he says no, he has much further to go.

credits

from Allegheny, released February 25, 2012

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Rodney DeCroo Vancouver, British Columbia

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