John Davis Jr.
My Father's Funeral Tent
Here at last is the shelter
you never taught me to pitch –
surrounded by fire-ring stones and ghost stories
foreign as the red clay they lower you under.
You will dwell in the house of this ground
long after the canvas and metal are gone,
long after this earth's camp is struck.
And I will be left to show my sons
how to face north in darkness by finding
Polaris just off the Big Dipper:
a shovel of black sky, spiraling.
Bio
John Davis Jr. is the author of Hard Inheritance (Five Oaks Press, 2016), Middle Class American Proverb (Negative Capability Press, 2014), and two other collections of poetry. His poems have appeared in venues such as Nashville Review, Barren magazine, One, The Common, and The American Journal of Poetry, among many others. He holds an MFA from University of Tampa.