Thin Air – a poem by Dan Campion

Thin Air

The questions to our parents that we did
not think to ask when they were here must be
allowed to dissipate in air, set free,
as have our parents been, the answers, hid
from us, persisting in the air amid
the other clouds of pollen, sympathy,
and dust of universal inquiry.
The questions, though, will not do as they’re bid.
They stay with us, unasked forever, now,
until we too regain the freedom of
thin air, the weather then our avatar.
Though Noah sent a raven and a dove,
the form his answer took, the olive bough,
was just a wisp, as revelations are.

Dan Campion is the author of The Mirror Test (2024), A Playbill for Sunset (2022), and Peter De Vries and Surrealism (1995) and is a co-editor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (1981, 2nd ed. 1998, 3rd ed. 2019). Dan’s poetry has appeared previously in Amethyst Review and in Able Muse, Light, Poetry, Rolling Stone, THINK, and many other magazines.