I spent more time with dad in the soft air
of those last few ragged months
than I had in years,
driving in to Pittsburgh for regular Saturday strolls.
Let’s walk he would say
to catch the sun on our tongues,
as if I were still a little kid.
Our long shadows were interrupted
only by our shoes rustling blistered leaves,
and a shared stillness of knowing
an end was coming.
His slim frame, though stippled with cancer
and yellowed from bile, continued
to work until just last month.
In days, his breathing would rasp and rattle
under a thousand humming hospital lights.
At the end, I got up, leaving an empty bed
and picked up our walk
to be with him again in the sun
Sumit Parikh is a poet from Cleveland, OH, whose work is shaped by his experiences as a pediatric neurologist, a son, and a father. He finds poetry in both the complexities of his work as a physician and the quiet moments of everyday family life. His work has appeared in I-70 Review, North Dakota Quarterly, The Marbled Sigh, and Intima, among others. Some of his poems can be found at sumitspoetry.com. Sumit lives with his wife and daughter. He is currently part of a writing mentorship and workshop with Brian Evans-Jones, a former Poet Laureate of Hampshire, UK, and winner of the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers.