NOBODY KNOWS IT BUT ME by Patrick O'Leary

My dad picked the poem below for his service and I think it really fit him--my sister and I heard it for the first time while planning his service. Strangly enough I had sent him a similar poem (The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost) the night before he died...and even stranger...I was reading "Await Your Reply" on the plane to see my Dad just a few hours before he passed and the author mentioned the poem iI had just sent him in the book...then I found out he had picked this poem which has some similarities, and then I was reading an article for work (about Deaf culture being similar to Harry Potter's world) and it too mentioned the one I had picked....comfort from Dad I guess....there are no coincidences some say...so here is Dad's pick:

There’s a place that I travel
when I want to roam
and nobody knows it but me.
The roads don’t go there
and the signs stay home
and nobody knows it but me.
It’s far far away and way way afar.
It’s over the moon and the sea.
And wherever you’re going
that’s wherever you are
and nobody knows it but me.

And the one I picked to comfort him (and us) because when I skimmed through my small selection of poetry books only this one and one other stood out to me:

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;


Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,


And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.


I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

The other poem I sent him was called "To One Shortly to Die" and though that seemed kind of morbid, it fit too. My dad's girlfriend read the two poems I sent him to him all that day and into the night and had me read them to him after my sister and I arrived--in that precious hour that we had with him before he left this earth. We miss him everyday...