This week’s poem, which appears on Easter, offers a story about a kind of secular ceremony created to remember someone who has died. It is no less holy and, through its details – that “fine wine dust” and a 9-year-old’s “pint-size fist” – shows us how those who have gone can live on: in a moment, in a poem, in us.

Marc Swan lives in Portland, and his poetry collections include “In a Distinct Minor Key” (2007) and “Simple Distraction” (2009).

A Gift

By Marc Swan

For A.C.S.

And when the gulls dropped down within a long arm’s reach

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we tossed broken Twinkies stuffed hurriedly by small hands

high into the air. The gulls swooped up, catching thick pieces

in their beaks, swallowing whole what may have been a femur

or a tibia or a rib burned down into fine wine dust, a few little

chunks, but mostly dust. My nine-year-old daughter beside me

stuffing more Twinkies, laughing at this adventure – grandpa

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loved those Twinkies. She grasps this gift in her pint-size fist,

eyes expectant; oh the patience she held waiting minute upon

minute for the right moment to toss up and watch the swirling,

the squawking – a crescendo carrying him higher and higher

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. This column is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2014 Marc Swan. It appeared in The Binnacle in 2014 and appears here by permission of the author.


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