Cripple Song
Scratches, screeches, and grunts become a triumphant body orchestra.
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From ULR
Issue 6 – Freedom
Requiem for Fathers Killed by COVID—for my father-in-law, Claudio Jorge Conti (1946-2020)
Fathers, taken inward, become language and melodies, their love an enduring heartbeat.
February 10, 2026
Our dying fathers, taken inward,
no longer embrace us cheek-to-cheek,
but become the tongue within our tongue:
gifting us the language to endure,
gifting us the melodies every father hums:
in the kitchen cooking dinner
or at his workbench well past midnight
to fix your bent bike wheel.
Our dying fathers, taken inward,
shed lab coats for cancer research,
shed dark suits with red ties,
shed blue coveralls streaked with grease;
the tv remote gone cold,
the bandoneón quiet in a corner,
half the chessboard left forever unmade.
And who will teach us now the names
of flowers when we go walking
through the woods? Who will guide us
to the river when summer heat
makes it hard to breathe?
The world’s orchards savaged by crows
gashing every peach, while, below,
in unmown grass, lie a basket,
two emptied gloves.
But why out of sight, out of mind?
To the grave we’ll go singing!
Our dying fathers taken inward,
close your eyes and hear them:
their mighty chorus always with us,
more intimate than your heartbeat:
I love you. I love you. I love you.
📖
PART OF A COLLECTIONRequiem for Fathers Killed by COVID—for my father-in-law, Claudio Jorge Conti (1946-2020) and 4 other poems
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Seth Michelson
Seth Michelson is an award-winning poet, translator, and professor of poetry. He has published seventeen books of original poetry in English and Spanish, poetry in translation, and a bilingual Spanish-English poetry anthology. He is frequently featured at poetry festivals, book fairs, and universities around the world, and his work has been translated into many languages, including Hindi, Italian, Malayalam, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Tamil, and Vietnamese. His many honors include fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, and the Lenfest Foundation, as well as prizes from Split This Rock, the International Book Awards, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the American Studies Association. He teaches the poetry of the hemispheric Americas at Washington and Lee University (USA), where he founded and directs the Center for Poetic Research. As a translator he focuses on poetry from underrepresented voices in Latin America. For example, he published the first-ever single-author book of poetry by a female Mapuche poet from territorial Argentina. He likewise edited and translated the groundbreaking bilingual poetry anthology, Dreaming America: Voices of Undocumented Youth in Maximum-Security Detention. It showcases poetry from workshops that he led in Spanish for three years inside the most restrictive maximum-security immigration detention center in the USA for undocumented, unaccompanied youth. All proceeds from its sale go to a legal defense fund for incarcerated undocumented children. He welcomes contact at [email protected].