My Father Does Not Sing

Abstract

My Father Does Not Sing Maurice Kenny (bio) The oncoming dark catches breath;even in the dream the Medicine Manpasses the dark along to another.No Pow Wow, but a carnival stretchedinto a raw theatre with men chasedout and off the midway I cannot find the Medicine Womanfor her herbs and rocks and charmsthough we know she is waiting. Shirley, who is not recognized at first,says to wait for the Holy Womanas she will appear and replacemy father who neither speaks nor singsin the dream, in the dark. I wakein folds of sheets, the radio blowinga flute; I tip over a plastic bottleof ginger ale and dawn slides throughthe dark. I wake. and wait. [End Page 59] Maurice Kenny Maurice Kenny has been the co-editor of the literary review magazine Contact/II as well as the editor/publisher of Strawberry Press. He has also been poetry editor of Adirondack Magazine, Poet-in-Residence at North Country Community College, and Visiting Professor at the University of Oklahoma at Norman, Oklahoma, the En’owkin Center at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, and at Paul Smith’s College. He is presently on the faculty of the SUNY College at Potsdam. The Mamas Poems received the American Book Award in 1984. The Bloomsbury Review cited Wounds Beneath the Flesh, which he edited, as the best anthology of 1983. Copyright © 2014 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents