Cradling Dad
Cathy Cain
I hooked up to the galaxy of the centrifuge
my milky platelets swirling like stars
like swifts into the chimney of night
I held the dream of him
the rhythm of his breath
how he loved the Milky Way
how he needed the stars
then the swift dark wind
those stars like blossoms scattered
then the snap of bough
that could not cradle nor hold
against the relentless cold
Poet’s Bio
Cathy Cain is the author of Bee Dance (The Poetry Box, 2019) and Empty Space Places You (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her honors include the Kay Snow Paulann Petersen Award for Poetry, the Edwin Markham Prize for Poetry, and recognition from the Oregon Poetry Association. Her poetry has appeared in Reed Magazine, The Poeming Pigeon, Verseweavers, and VoiceCatcher. Cain taught in the public schools for over thirty years. She lives near Portland.
Judge’s Comments – Andrea Hollander
I was pleasantly stunned by this brief poem. Its author uses an array of surprising metaphors, as well as—at the poem’s powerful close—a children’s rhyme most of us grew up with, which is alluded to in the poem’s title, though we don’t discover this until we reach the closing lines.
The journey one takes through the poem is filled with swift turns, the strongest of them marked by stanza breaks to indicate larger pauses. And though there is no punctuation, there is no need. The poet carries us along rhythmically without fault, using that sudden extra tabbed space in the penultimate line to signal the poem’s final turn. The closing end-rhyme completes the poem memorably by providing aural satisfaction. And we are left, too, with the almost palpable presence of the speaker at the very moment he or she can no longer “hold” him “against the relentless cold.” Marvelous!