NaPoWriMo, Day Thirty, Poem Twenty Nine

My grandfather, as my mother put it last week, came home. He recovered from his pneumonia finally, and he might be over his cancer too. He'll be in rehab for a couple of months. I've been evoking him the past month he's been in the hospital under sedation. This is one more time.


Villanelle

The great triumphs happen while you're away.
You grandfather now makes fists he plans to use,
the poet only getting in the way.

Last week there was a quarantine the day
you tried to visit, still afraid of what you could lose,
but the triumph happened while you were away.

You came by over weeks, volunteered to stay,
though Meme chastised you when you'd choose
to carry your poet's notebook, getting in the way

of half-filled coffee and cell phones put away
while even Pepe, worlds away, listened for good news.
It came at last, sometime after you went away

to Boston, more your home away from home these days
than home, waiting for calls, cursing our lack of use,
the poet in you only getting in the way,

writing half-brave verse to help you pray
for victory for your grandfather choose
to come back, and he did while you were away
and writing, hoping your words might show him the way.