I don't have many poems specifically for fathers, or mothers either, for that matter. Do poets not have parents? Do they not love them? Maybe loving parents just make boring poetry - not enough angst. I tried Googling mother +poetry, but the results were more greeting card verse than anything. So I am posting a couple of poems that sort of relate to fathers, and that will have to do.
My own father is wonderful. The greatest gift he gave me was an ability to be myself. He always said I could be anything I wanted if I worked for it. He expected the same things from all his children, son and daughters, except in one area: He always told us girls, "Put a little lipstick on before you go out. You never know who you might meet."
My husband is also a wonderful father, but that is a blog my son or daughter must write. Liz?
Poor children, with such stable parents, can they ever be poets?
This first poem is about a father "dancing" with his child, something I remember my father doing with me.
My Papa’s Waltz
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
Theodore Roethke
I love this next poem. The poet does not actually have a child, so he holds on to his "inner child" and shows it the moon.
Moon
The moon is full tonight
an illustration for sheet music,
an image in Matthew Arnold
glimmering on the English Channel,
or a ghost over a smoldering battlefield
in one of the history plays.
It’s as full as it was
in that poem by Coleridge
where he carries his year-old son
into the orchard behind the cottage
and turns the baby’s face to the sky
to see for the first time
the earth’s bright companion,
something amazing to make his crying seem small.
And if you wanted to follow this example,
tonight would be the night
to carry some tiny creature outside
and introduce him to the moon.
And if your house has no child,
you can always gather into your arms
the sleeping infant of yourself,
as I have done tonight,
and carry him outdoors,
all limp in his tattered blanket,
making sure to steady his lolling head
with the palm of your hand.
And while the wind ruffles the pear trees
in the corner of the orchard
and dark roses wave against a stone wall,
you can turn him on your shoulder
and walk in circles on the lawn
drunk with the light.
You can lift him up into the sky,
your eyes nearly as wide as his,
as the moon climbs high into the night.
Billy Collins
