You’ve been gone something like
twenty-two years now, although
it doesn’t seem all that long to me.
It is like I saw you five years ago
and even that seems longer than real.
They tell me I was fifty when
you departed but I can’t clearly recall
what it was like to be fifty.
I know I never said goodbye to you
and I do regret that but I did
say it four years ago at your gravestone
minutes after I said hello for the first time.
Adoption warps time I guess, for in
that world I could find you, my mother
a decade after you died, but
knowing you for twenty years has
filled a hole in my heart I thought
would remain an open wound forever.