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He looked so tired after breakfast
says the nurse
we put him back to bed.

She presses a button
and my father
rises toward us.

For something to say
mum remembers
that time you stole apples
from Jimmy Snoddy’s garden!

He smiles at her
slyly. He’s saying
nothing.

Outside the window
a bullfinch is feasting
on birch buds.

Copyright © 2022 by Ken Cockburn. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 18, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“When my mother could no longer cope with my father’s dementia, he went into a nursing home. There, he became increasingly inactive and silent. I was struck by my mother’s apple-stealing memory, which returns some agency to him, and a streak of wildness neither of them exhibited as parents. The poem also allows his silence an expressive quality. The busy appetite of the bullfinch stands in contrast to his inactivity, and offers an image of his disease: in spring, the birds can damage trees by eating too many buds.”
—Ken Cockburn