Memory of him

“We live as it happens then go,”
he said while drunken. “That’s life.”
My thought, at ten:
I want to go worth Mother’s ordeal.

His dream to be a doctor left
when obeyed his father coxed him
to be a police man, instead.
Mother said once he helped a farmer keep
his land could’ve lost in the dispute with
a Japanese unlawful. Since then, at times,

Mother found bags of potato or rice
at our doorstep. Ignoring his word
to take them back to the farmer,
she fed her hungry children
To add to the hardship,
he quit his job even before finding new one
to estrange the corruption, derailed colleagues.

He delivered all his children by himself…
Only if were he not a drunk…
he would’ve had the better one to say than that.
Only if…but…
Tired, idiotic good soul,
gone, leaving me with his gene.

©Byung A. Fallgren