This week’s poem, by Robert Petrillo, muses on a father who couldn’t sit still and couldn’t change his luck. I love the details of the speaker’s father-son trips to the racetrack, what that child learned in the stands, and what the grown man can look back and see with both clear eyes and compassion.
Robert Petrillo is a retired English teacher. He’s dabbled in publishing and leading a poetry workshop at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USM for the past several years. His work has appeared in a number of literary journals. He lives in Westbrook.
The Finish
We moved around a lot when I was young;
my father was a restless soul, not sitting
still for long, not even at the races where
he’d ramble up and down the stands in search
of better luck. I’d tag along to learn
how track conditions could be read by sight
and then confirmed in program histories.
In that sodded university he’d earned
a bachelor’s degree, but lost a family.
Statistical analysis was not
his strongest course, but how was he to know
the odds were stacked against his ever winning
what he needed most – a chance to make it right,
the jackpot streaming gold, his horse in flight.
– Robert Petrillo
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “The Finish,” ©2024 by Robert Petrillo, was originally published in Reflections (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USM). It appears by permission of the author.