I’m starting a new year, but it is really just another day.
Balloons, champagne, a midnight kiss doesn’t change a thing.
I am still my father’s daughter and he is not here.
It is now 50 years, a half a century, that I have lived without him.
The black and white picture of his face
sits on my desk in a frame that is
the sun on one side and the moon on another-
a reminder that I wake up without him and
go to sleep with only memories of him.
I was so little when he was in my life-
how much can I actually remember?
He would pop me on the kitchen counter
and he would cut vegetables that
I then got to put in the salad bowl.
He would place my bunny in my lap with a carrot
while I watched Sesame Street, but I was jealous because
then he would leave me to watch Hogan’s heros
with my brother in his room.
And then he was gone- was it days or months?
I’m not sure but I was sitting in a church,
words I didn’t understand were spoken,
songs were sung that did not please my ears,
and it ended with a poem.
The poem had rhythm and it had rhymes.
I didn’t understand the meaning,
but it somehow it moved into my heart
and it was the last good bye to my dad.
Moving on through school-
elementary, middle, and high
I gravitated to poetry-
I rewrote books of poetry every summer
and latched on to every word the teacher said
when we would have a brief unit on poems and poets.
I spent entire semesters in college studying
poets, poetry, and creative writing.
Any time spent with poetry for some reason
made me feel a deep urning in the pit of my stomach
and an aching loneliness that made me miss my dad.
My family never talked about my dad,
and my questions and curiosity
were met with indifference and even lies.
I was never given any of his possessions when he passed,
nor were stories shared to keep his memory alive.
All I had was a brown paper bag a quarter full
with pennies that my dad had saved for me for my
seventh birthday, just days before he died.
It wasn’t until my mom passed that I went through
boxes of papers and some really damaged photos
that I got a new glimpse of my dad.
The most precious item I found in that box were
letters from my dad to his foster sister.
My dad was in an asylum for trying to commit suicide,
as he apparently suffered from severe depression,
and he wrote these letters begging his sister to
help take care of his kids. He was undergoing
electric shock therapy with the hopes that
he would someday return to his kids.
Every word in every letter was carefully crafted or not,
but they had a cadence, a rhythm, a style that was
poetic and beautiful. The words embraced me
like a hug. His words were so unique,
it was like a fingerprint that not only did he have
but that he had passed onto me. His phrases
were identical to my phrases- his juxtoposition
of words was identical to mine.
I FOUND MY FATHER!
OR DID MY FATHER FIND ME?
My appreciation for EE Cummings, Walt Whitman, and others
had become my surrogate fathers, but now
I had my own father, and I am his daughter.
Every poem I write, every metaphor, ever simile,
that both came and still comes pouring
on to pages in front of me carries
the spirit of my Dad.
Am I complete now?
No never.
But what was once an incredible aloneness,
a mystery, an enigma has been solved.
I write like my father, for my father,
and although he sits in a frame on my desk
and I am still without him when I wake and when I sleep,
I write every word on every page with his spirit
guiding me and sharing his wisdom of words with me.