Salt Instead of Seed
by Pino Coluccio
The boy who's lit the lamp again to read
notices a shadow on the snow.
His father's, sowing salt instead of seed
along the walk, who's stopped to pick a bead
of breath that's frozen to his scarf. Although
the boy has lit the lamp to read
he wonders how it would have felt to weed
the beans his father used to grow,
the father sowing salt instead of seed
past the house, who's stumbled on a need
now to dim both the kitchen's cozy glow,
and him, the boy who's lit the lamp to read.
For though the boy had started as a sort of greed
by proxy, that led the man to leave behind his hoe,
while he's sowing salt instead of seed
a page turns; he sees the boy proceed
to chapter one. And knows he doesn't know
the boy who's lit the lamp to read.
The father's sowing salt instead of seed.
Pino Coluccio lives in Toronto, where he was born in 1973 to parents who
immigrated from Buonalbergo, a town in the province of Benevento, Italy, in 1958. His work has won a few small prizes and once appeared in Descant
magazine.
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