poems about fathers

Poem of the Week, by Sharon Olds

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Friends, I’m leading a FREE creative writing workshop via Zoom on Friday, March 20, 1-4 pm Central Time. Rewriting the Story, Reclaiming the Self is designed for anyone living with the memories of abuse: bullying, domestic violence, an emotionally abusive relationship, a sexual or physical assault. I’d love to see you in the room. Email me at alisonmcghee@gmail.com if you’d like to sign up. 

I miss the pace of snail mail. I miss the anticipation of a letter and the tactile feel of it in my hands. In a tiny never-used room at the top of my house are bins and boxes full of all the pre-email letters I’ve never been able to throw away.

Last November I added a new box to the storage room, a small Whitman’s candies box filled with the letters my father sent my mother daily from basic training. I couldn’t open any of those letters, couldn’t open them, couldn’t couldn’t couldn’t, and then, one morning last week, I did.

My father was a giant man with a hot temper who terrified me as a child. But my God, these letters. His hidden gentleness, his love and longing for my mother, are in every one of those handwritten missives. So much innocence and excitement about their upcoming wedding. In his letters I see the decency of a young, good man who had fallen in love, whose whole life was yet to come. I know him so much better now.

My Father’s Diary, by Sharon Olds

When I sit on the bed, and spring the brass
scarab legs of its locks, inside
is the stacked, shy wealth of his print.
He could not write in script, so the pages
are sturdy with the beamwork of printedness,
WENT TO LOOK AT A CAR, DAD IN A
GOOD MOOD AT DINNER, LUNCH WITH MOM,
TRIED OUT SOME RACQUETS—a life of ease,
except when he spun his father’s DeSoto on the
ice, and a young tree whirled up
to the hood, throwing up her arms—until
LOIS. PLAYED TENNIS WITH LOIS, LUNCH
WITH MOM AND LOIS, DRIVING WITH LOIS,
LONG DRIVE WITH LOIS. And then,
LOIS! I CAN’T BELIEVE IT! SHE IS SO
GOOD, SO SWEET, SO GENEROUS, I HAVE
NEVER, WHAT HAVE I EVER DONE
TO DESERVE SUCH A GIRL? Between the tines
of his W’s, and liquid on the serifs, moonlight,
the self of the grown boy pouring
out, kneeling in pine-needle weave,
worshiping her. It was my father
good, it was my father grateful,
it was my father dead, who had left me
these small structures of his young brain—
he wanted me to know him, he wanted
someone to know him.​ 

​Click here for more information about the wondrous Sharon Olds. Today’s poem is from Blood, Tin, Straw, first published by Knopf in 1999. 


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Poem of the Week, by Benjamin Cutler

Posted on by alisonmcghee

This summer, July 17-19, I’m offering a mini-session of our popular Write Together sessions, in which we gather on Zoom for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening and write quietly together from a guided prompt. Cost: $100. Please click here for all the details. I’d love to see you in the Zoom room. 

At the diner

Once, a father called his daughter on her 33rd birthday and left a message on the answering machine.

“Happy 33rd!” he said. “Happy 33rd.”

Pause. Pause. Pause.

His daughter stood by, wondering if that was the end of it. Then came a clearing of the throat and a mumbled I love you.The daughter opened the answering machine and snatched out the tape on which her father’s message was recorded. It was the first time she’d ever heard him say that.

I am that daughter. All these years later I still have that tape, an old Radio Shack cassette.

Blessings on the fathers, all the fathers, and all the men who stand in as fathers. The fathers who are able to say “I love you” easily and often, and the fathers who aren’t. The father who pushes his child on the swing, higher and higher, and the father who lets his child hitch a ride on his wheelchair.

The father who scratches out a budget in pencil on lined yellow paper, the better to show his daughter where it all goes when she says in teenage superiority, But where could it all go? How can there be none left at the end of the month? The father who comes stumbling out of his baby’s bedroom late at night and throws himself into a chair, saying, I spend half my life in a dark room, singing. The father who untangles his child’s bobber from the weeds where she has cast it yet again, and the father who stands  his child on his feet to dance her around the room.

Blessings on the father who wore blue coveralls for the barn and washed up in Lava soap. On the father who grew old and forgot where he left the car. On the father who let his child twirl on the stool at the diner, who pulled her up the hill on the toboggan, who taught her how to make scrambled eggs. Blessings on the father who cried on the plane home from visiting his first grandchild and told his wife I wish I could do it all over. I wish I could do a better job.

Dressing My Father-in-Law for Burial, by Benjamin Cutler

I would have tied the tie differently:
full Windsor, centered and snug
against the white, pressed collar.

But his oldest son wanted the job—
and who could deny him this right?

So I watched—half Windsor,
knot too tight, loop overly loose
around the unbuttoned neck

as though the man were ready
for his after-work commute.

See him now, this grieving son—
hands atremble and earnest—tying 
Dad’s final tie: inexpertly, imperfectly.

But isn’t this how any of us love?—
the only way we know how.

Click here for more information about poet Benjamin Cutler. Today’s poem can be found in his brand-new collection, Wild Silence.

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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Cecilia Woloch

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My father, who died last month, was a giant of a man from boyhood on. He was famous for keeping the house-heating wood stove in our kitchen cranked to stupefying levels of heat. Much of our childhood was spent in service to that wood stove: cutting, chopping, hauling and stacking wood to keep it fed.

Many of my abiding memories of my father are centered around wood, which, even in his eighties, he continued to chop and haul. As a child, his giant presence could be overwhelming, but I picture him now, and think of how easy it can be to overlook, in a giant man, the tenderness and gentleness that also lived inside him.

The Pick, by Cecilia Woloch

I watched him swinging the pick in the sun,
breaking the concrete steps into chunks of rock,
and the rocks into dust,
and the dust into earth again.
I must have sat for a very long time on the split rail fence,
just watching him.
My father’s body glistened with sweat,
his arms flew like dark wings over his head.
He was turning the backyard into terraces,
breaking the hill into two flat plains.
I took for granted the power of him,
though it frightened me, too.
I watched as he swung the pick into the air
and brought it down hard
and changed the shape of the world,
and changed the shape of the world again.

Click here for details and to register for our new Write Together session in early June. 

​Click here for more information about Cecilia Woloch.​

Poem of the Week, by Reginald Dwayne Betts

Posted on by alisonmcghee

pigs-eye-2014Yesterday a friend told me how she longed for her father to show any interest in her. How she’d carefully planned to text him a few days before Father’s Day so that he wouldn’t feel the pressure of the holiday itself, but maybe he’d respond? I listened to her, told her how sorry I was, told her about others I knew in the same situation, thinking it might help her not feel so alone, as this poem by the magnificent Dwayne Betts floated through my mind. 

 

Blood History, by Reginald Dwayne Betts

The things that abandon you get remembered different. 
As precise as the English language can be, with words 
like penultimate and perseverate, there is not a combination
of sounds that describes only that leaving. Once, 
drinking & smoking with buddies, a friend asked if
I’d longed for a father. Had he said wanted, I would have 
dismissed him in the way that the youth dismiss it all:
a shrug, sarcasm, a jab to his stomach, laughter. 
But he said longing. & in a different place, I might
have wept. Said, Once, my father lived with us & then he 
didn’t & it fucked me up so much I never thought about
his leaving until I held my own son in my arms & only 
now speak on it. A man who drank Boone’s Farm & Mad
Dog like water once told me & some friends that there is no
word for father where he comes from, not like we know it. 
There, the word for father is the same as the word for listen. 
The blunts we passed around let us forget our
tongues. Not that much though. But what if the old
head knew something? & if you have no father, you can’t
hear straight. Years later, another friend wondered why
I named my son after my father. You know, that’s a thing
turn your life to a prayer that nay dead man gonna answer.

 

 

 

 

 

For more information about Reginald Dwayne Betts, please check out his website.

Click here to listen to my new podcast, Words by Winter.

 

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Poem of the Week, by Robert Hayden

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My father and I were in the car last month, driving back from the diner where we go early each morning I’m home visiting my parents. (Say the word “home” to yourself – what’s the image that comes instantly into your mind?) I asked him if he thought tIMG_3873here was anything beyond this world, and that my grandmother –his mother– had told me near the end of her life that she believed in a heaven where my grandfather, and her parents, and her sister and her friends would all be waiting for her when she got there. My father laughed and said he didn’t know about that, but that he did believe there was some kind of force in the universe, beyond his power to grasp. When I was a child my father was a force in my universe. He was a giant man with giant physical strength, the kind of man who would pour Clorox on a bleeding wound to disinfect it and avoid a doctor visit. This poem, by Robert Hayden, always comes to mind on Father’s Day. I first read it as a child and didn’t understand it. But I do now.

Those Winter Sundays 
     – Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
For more information on Robert Hayden, please click here.

 

 

Poem of the Week, by Al Zolynas

Posted on by alisonmcghee

This morning at breakfast I learned something about my grandfather, who died when I was seven, that I never knew before. I’ve been thinking about him all day now in the light of this knowledge that I didn’t have before, how it recasts the image in my mind and heart of who he was, how he lived, what he loved and what he missed. This poem, which I’ve loved for a long time but never posted, came back to me as I thought, along with a quote from William Faulkner from Light in August: “Man knows so little about his fellows.” Poem of the Week, by Al Zolynas.

The Hat in the Sky
– Al Zolynas

After the war,
after I was born,
my father’s hobby
(perhaps his obsession)
was photography.
New fathers often become
photographers, it seems.
But he took pictures of many things
besides me,
as if he suddenly felt it all
slipping away
and wanted to hold it forever.
In one of the many shoe boxes
full of photographs
in my father’s house,
one photo sticks in my mind,
a snapshot
of a black hat
in midair,
the kind of hat fashionable in the forties,
a fedora – something
Bogie would wear.
Someone has thrown it
into the air–
perhaps my father himself,
perhaps someone in an exuberant moment
at a rally or gathering.
It’s still there,
hanging in the sky
as ordinary and impossible
as a painting by Magritte,
and it’s impossible
how it wrenches my heart, somehow.
At odd moments in my life,
that hat appears to me
for no discernible reason.

—

​ For more information on Al Zolynas, please click here.

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