This Man
This man is refined –
his incomparable intellect,
the way he moves his hand, his eyes
to look up from resting.
This man is charged
with electrical inspiration,
every day singing, making notes
on paper, in the sky, pushed forward
by an inner force, potent and searing,
tracing existing edges, making new edges
and shapes from sand.
He is always sharp with humour and often
he is joyful, dancing in spurts
or making strange sounds
like an animal let out of his cage,
touching grass for the first time.
This man grew up in home of brutal hostility –
a violent loveless father and an ally for a mother,
but never a protector, and a brother who was once
vibrant and on fire then became soiled with bitterness
and died before he reached sixty.
This man has always been a devoted father.
When his children were young every afternoon
he took them on adventures to local parks he named,
and they explored these sacred fantasies without money
and just a stroller. He read to them every night –
sometimes other people’s books, sometimes
his own stories he told them, inserting
them as heroes and stars of the tales.
When his children grew older, there were rough years –
re-defining love, stretching love into hurt
and anger clogged then bursting. But that is the past,
and now, his family is tenderly connected everyday
with rich affection – each loving him
and each loving each other. He has heaven again
with his family and in his home.
This man is a husband. He is the kindest,
most entertaining and the most uncompromising
of lovers and friends – never letting me get away
with darkness – ridged barriers of purity I am called
to account if I every cross, our mutual understanding
clear and unaltered through the years.
After my mother died, he read to me every night,
tales of detectives, of an isolated Swedish man
finding life on a stark iced-covered island.
When my father died, he did the same
in a different way – being there for me, sitting beside me,
allowing my grief to live for years as the main course,
patient, supporting, until that grief became background.
This man never made much of an income,
but works at his craft as though every day
is his last – at the library, in the basement and on
walks where he fine tunes and rehearses his creations.
This man is a genius, many know this, but
in many ways, he has never been received
or seen by the greater world.
Those who have seen him,
know, and call him what he is – a legend,
a master of his art.
This man has never
diluted or degraded his dignity
just to receive attention,
nor has he twisted his moral and spiritual core
just because he is getting older and what he believed
when he was younger – that his work was guaranteed
to receive world-wide recognition –
has not been the case, has not been valued on
a wide-scale for its rare magnificence.
And though that baffles him,
has left a living wound inside him, he has not
grown hard and distorted by blaming others nor
by relinquishing his sturdy and fecund faith.
This man is the best man I have ever known,
and no one knows him like I do.
It has been a radiant privilege to love this man,
to walk decades together hand in hand.
He is an iconoclast. He follows
Jesus. He is my love and he is golden,
beautiful as the first altered leaf,
the first breeze in the first inklings
of a brilliant oncoming fall.
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Copyright © by Allison Grayhurst 2026
amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst
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First published in “Synchronized Chaos” October 2026
https://synchchaos.com/poetry-from-allison-grayhurst-18/
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You can listen to the poem below:
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