Father

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1. Father My father knows the proper way The nation should be run; He tells us children every day Just what should now be done. He knows the way to fix the trusts, He has a simple plan; But if the furnace needs repairs, We have to hire a man. My father, in a day or two […]...
2. Father and Son Now in the suburbs and the falling light I followed him, and now down sandy road Whitter than bone-dust, through the sweet Curdle of fields, where the plums Dropped with their load of ripeness, one by one. Mile after mile I followed, with skimming feet, After the secret master of my blood, Him, steeped in […]...
3. Boy and Father THE BOY Alexander understands his father to be a famous lawyer. The leather law books of Alexander’s father fill a room like hay in a barn. Alexander has asked his father to let him build a house like bricklayers build, a house with walls and roofs made of big leather law books. The rain beats […]...
4. To His Honoured and Most Ingenious Friend Mr. Charles Cotton For brave comportment, wit without offence, Words fully flowing, yet of influence: Thou art that man of men, the man alone, Worthy the public admiration: Who with thine own eyes read’st what we do write, And giv’st our numbers euphony, and weight. Tell’st when a verse springs high, how understood To be, or not born […]...
5. Tonight I Can Write Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Write, for example, ‘The night is starry And the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’ The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. Through nights like this one I […]...
6. My Father's Love Letters On Fridays he’d open a can of Jax After coming home from the mill, & ask me to write a letter to my mother Who sent postcards of desert flowers Taller than men. He would beg, Promising to never beat her Again. Somehow I was happy She had gone, & sometimes wanted To slip in […]...
7. Come up from the Fields, Father 1 COME up from the fields, father, here’s a letter from our Pete; And come to the front door, mother-here’s a letter from thy dear son. 2 Lo, ’tis autumn; Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder, Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages, with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind; Where apples ripe in […]...
8. Cacoethes Scribendi If all the trees in all the woods were men; And each and every blade of grass a pen; If every leaf on every shrub and tree Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea Were changed to ink, and all earth’s living tribes Had nothing else to do but act as scribes, And for […]...
9. You Are Old, Father William “You are old, Father william,” the young man said, “And your hair has become very white; And yet you incessantly stand on your head Do you think, at your age, it is right? “In my youth,” Father William replied to his son, “I feared it might injure the brain; But now that I’m perfectly sure […]...
10. I Don't Know If History Repeats Itself I don’t Know if history repeats itself But I do know that you don’t. I remember that city was didvided Not only between Jews and Arabs, But Between me and you, When we were there together. We made ourselves a womb of dangers We built ourselves a house of deadening wars Like men of far […]...
11. The Child Is Father To The Man ‘The child is father to the man.’ How can he be? The words are wild. Suck any sense from that who can: ‘The child is father to the man.’ No; what the poet did write ran, ‘The man is father to the child.’ ‘The child is father to the man!’ How can he be? The […]...
12. Coloring Book Each picture is heartbreakingly banal, A kitten and a ball of yarn, A dog and bone. The paper is cheap, easily torn. A coloring book’s authority is derived From its heavy black lines As unalterable as the ten commandments Within which minor decisions are possible: The dog black and white, The kitten gray. Under the […]...
13. Letter Of Recommendation From My Father To My Future Wife During the war, I was in China. Every night we blew the world to hell. The sky was purple and yellow Like his favorite shirt. I was in India once On the Ganges in a tourist boat. There were soldiers, Some women with parasols. A dead body floated by Going in the opposite direction. My […]...
14. End, Middle, Beginning There was an unwanted child. Aborted by three modern methods She hung on to the womb, Hooked onto I Building her house into it And it was to no avail, To black her out. At her birth She did not cry, Spanked indeed, But did not yell Instead snow fell out of her mouth. As […]...
15. Daybreak In Alabama When I get to be a composer I’m gonna write me some music about Daybreak in Alabama And I’m gonna put the purtiest songs in it Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist And falling out of heaven like soft dew. I’m gonna put some tall tall trees in it And the scent […]...
16. Song To Be Sung by the Father of Infant Female Children My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky; Contrariwise, my blood runs cold When little boys go by. For little boys as little boys, No special hate I carry, But now and then they grow to men, And when they do, they marry. No matter how they tarry, Eventually they marry. […]...
17. Still I Rise You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? ‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells Pumping in my living room. Just like moons and like […]...
18. Torn Shades How, in the first place, did They get torn-pulled down hard Too many times: to hide a blow, Or sex, or a man In stained pajamas? The tear blade-shaped, Serrated, in tatters. And once, In a house flatside to a gas station, As snow fell at a speed and angle you could lean on, Two […]...
19. A Historical Breakfast A man is bringing a cup of coffee to his face, Tilting it to his mouth. It’s historical, he thinks. He scratches his head: another historical event. He really ought to rest, he’s making an awful lot of History this morning. Oh my, now he’s buttering toast, another piece of History is being made. He […]...
20. On The Death of a Father I was schooled well before he died, able at least To feel what others felt when their fathers Were deceased. Able but not willing And not without despair to glimpse the man Who’d hide the truth of just how much he cared. My argent truth was fulsome gloom, Moribund and drear, my face a patent […]...
21. Elegy For My Father HLF, August 8, 1918-August 22, 1997 “Bequeath us to no earthly shore until Is answered in the vortex of our grave The seal’s wide spindrift gaze towards paradise.” -Hart Crane, “Voyages” “If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand it” -Ludwig Wittgenstein Under the ocean that stretches out wordlessly Past the long edge of the […]...
22. The Little Box The little box gets her first teeth And her little length Little width little emptiness And all the rest she has The little box continues growing The cupboard that she was inside Is now inside her And she grows bigger bigger bigger Now the room is inside her And the house and the city and […]...
23. The Ballad Of Father Gilligan The old priest Peter Gilligan Was weary night and day; For half his flock were in their beds, Or under green sods lay. Once, while he nodded on a chair, At the moth-hour of eve, Another poor man sent for him, And he began to grieve. ‘I have no rest, nor joy, nor peace, For […]...
24. Bombardment Four days the earth was rent and torn By bursting steel, The houses fell about us; Three nights we dared not sleep, Sweating, and listening for the imminent crash Which meant our death. The fourth night every man, Nerve-tortured, racked to exhaustion, Slept, muttering and twitching, While the shells crashed overhead. The fifth day there […]...
25. Father Explains “There where that ray touches the plain And the shadows escape as if they really ran, Warsaw stands, open from all sides, A city not very old but quite famous. “Farther, where strings of rain hang from a little cloud, Under the hills with an acacia grove Is Prague. Above it, a marvelous castle Shored […]...
26. The End of the World Here, at the end of the world, The flowers bleed As if they were hearts, The hearts ooze a darkness Like india ink, & poets dip their pens in & they write. “Here, at the end of the world,” They write, Not knowing what it means. “Here, where the sky nurses on black milk, Where […]...
27. Something Has Fallen Something has fallen wordlessly And holds still on the black driveway. You find it, like a jewel, Among the empty bottles and cans Where the dogs toppled the garbage. You pick it up, not sure If it is stone or wood Or some new plastic made To replace them both. When you raise your sunglasses […]...
28. Father And Child She hears me strike the board and say That she is under ban Of all good men and women, Being mentioned with a man That has the worst of all bad names; And thereupon replies That his hair is beautiful, Cold as the March wind his eyes....
29. My Father’s Hats Sunday mornings I would reach High into his dark closet while standing on a chair and tiptoeing reach Higher, touching, sometimes fumbling the soft crowns and imagine I was in a forest, wind hymning through pines, where the musky scent Of rain clinging to damp earth was his scent I loved, lingering on Bands, leather, […]...
30. Autumn Whoever has no house now will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening And wander on the boulevards, up and down… – from Autumn Day, Rainer Maria Rilke Its stain is everywhere. The sharpening air Of late afternoon Is now the colour of tea. […]...
31. The Fair Maid of Perth's House All ye good people, afar and near, To my request pray lend an ear; I advise you all without delay to go And see the Fair Maid’s House – it is a rare show. Some of the chairs there are very grand, They have been cut and carved by a skilful hand; And kings, perchance, […]...
32. To God the Father To the little, pitiful God I make my prayer, The God with the long grey beard And flowing robe fastened with a hempen girdle Who sits nodding and muttering on the all-too-big throne Of Heaven. What a long, long time, dear God, since you set the Stars in their places, Girded the earth with the […]...
33. Afternoon Rain in State Street Cross-hatchings of rain against grey walls, Slant lines of black rain In front of the up and down, wet stone sides of buildings. Below, Greasy, shiny, black, horizontal, The street. And over it, umbrellas, Black polished dots Struck to white An instant, Stream in two flat lines Slipping past each other with the smoothness of […]...
34. On Receiving News of the War Snow is a strange white word. No ice or frost Has asked of bud or bird For Winter’s cost. Yet ice and frost and snow From earth to sky This Summer land doth know. No man knows why. In all men’s hearts it is. Some spirit old Hath turned with malign kiss Our lives to […]...
35. The Tavern Whenever I go by there nowadays And look at the rank weeds and the strange grass, The torn blue curtains and the broken glass, I seem to be afraid of the old place; And something stiffens up and down my face, For all the world as if I saw the ghost Of old Ham Amory, […]...
36. The Relief of Mafeking Success to Colonel Baden-Powell and his praises loudly sing, For being so brave in relieving Mafeking, With his gallant little band of eight hundred men, They made the Boers fly from Mafeking like sheep escaping from a pen. ‘Twas in the year of 1900 and on the 18th of May, That Colonel Baden-Powell beat the […]...
37. Some Like Poetry Write it. Write. In ordinary ink On ordinary paper: they were given no food, They all died of hunger. “All. How many? It’s a big meadow. How much grass For each one?” Write: I don’t know. History counts its skeletons in round numbers. A thousand and one remains a thousand, As though the one had […]...
38. These are the Signs to Nature's Inns These are the Signs to Nature’s Inns Her invitation broad To Whosoever famishing To taste her mystic Bread These are the rites of Nature’s House The Hospitality That opens with an equal width To Beggar and to Bee For Sureties of her staunch Estate Her undecaying Cheer The Purple in the East is set And […]...
39. A Spring Piece Left In The Middle Taut, thick fingers punch The teeth of my typewriter. Three words are down on paper in capitals: SPRING SPRING SPRING… And me poet, proofreader, The man who’s forced to read Two thousand bad lines every day for two liras Why, since spring has come, am I still sitting here like a ragged black chair? My […]...
40. My mother was fortune, my father generosity and bounty My mother was fortune, my father generosity and bounty; I Am joy, son of joy, son of joy, son of joy. Behold, the Marquis of Glee has attainted felicity; this city and Plain are filled with soldiers and drums and flags. If I encounter a wolf, he becomes moonfaced Joseph; if I go Down into […]...