Good Poem

Overnight
by Pat Schneider

The day your son calls you on the telephone
and is no more your boy, you know
he is someone else's man.
Hi, Mom! he calls across a chasm.
You guess the joy that carved it,
and you cry, Hello!

She will be the bridge, now,
between you and your son.
Overnight he has become shy with you.
Now that he knows her secret
he has guessed your own, guessed
the journeys that his father made
to fetch a son from darkness
on the other side of utter letting go.

Hello, you say, and suddenly remember
how in the fourth grade he brought a pigeon home.
How, as if it were an ordinary coming home,
he opened the front door, walked in and called,
Hi, Mom! How his eyes were pleading,
with love, like pinions, feathering the air.