A Son's Sestina My dead father rests in cliched peace that in single #life, escaped him, most of the time. Ashes now, but I imagine his sleep to be good, like a man found not guilty in a trial. He left me a large aspidistra pot, stuffed full of #poems, on each an avian mark. Chipped, it also bears scratches and a mark I recall from youth, five letters spelling peace, initials too, (Peter and Olivia Thompson), ‘Peace POT.’ Two poor writers, with little sense of time, artists of their present, but blind to future’s trial, where one endures, the other silenced in sleep. After mother died, I watched Father in his sleep, gaunt, tear streaked face, and sensed the mark of Caine upon his soul. On trial, not knowing if he would find a peace, his flesh in limbo, stuck for all time, slow braised in hellish casserole pot. Words, like fragile shoots from a flower pot, grew slowly, and brought comfort to his sleep. Pantoums, sestinas and sonnets beat time, conducted by his pen to indelibly mark each #poem with a white dove, of peace, an avian army of advocates that argued at his trial and won. I know now why each #poem and all the trial attempts, he threw into that pot, as if he knew would grow a protective kind of peace, that prepared me for the nightmares of my sleep. Writer warrior, his sword but a pen, to make his mark, and create a memory of her time. With each precious #poem I read, over time, I feel closer to one I never could trial, a mother, whose breast my milk teeth couldn’t mark, who now, in poetry preserved, would never go to pot. How I relish those times, whilst in my sleep, he wrote of Mother's strokes throughout my slumbered peace. When my time has come for blissful peace, and I begin my trial of eternal sleep, don't grieve, just mark me, please, with a #poem in your pot.