dVerse Poets Pub has a “meeting the bar” challenge today, hosted by Victoria C. Slotto, to write about a personal hero. I thought of an older poem (reposted below) about my father, who, as many of readers know, died recently after a protracted battle with Parkinson’s Disease.
I’m not sure that I thought of my father as much of a hero when I was young. This may in part be because he was very generous with his time–the generosity of the archetypical hero tends to involve one swift grand swoop, not a day-to-day slog. For another, my dad could exhibit both deep tenderness and touching vulnerability–qualities that tends to be “heeled” in the archetypical hero. Finally, he was self-effacing, good at bringing out the best in others. He tended to make us see ourselves as heroes (or at least as competent–which, for the young, is almost as good).
Here’s the poem:
My Father (baby birds)
My father’s voice
when he sang
was deep and cragged and
reminded me of a froggie
gone a’courting.
But this was baby birds.
It was not even a person
who had died.
It was not even a particularly noble dog,
though like all of its species, it was capable
of a self-debasing attachment that could
seem Arthurian.
But after the accident, the rush,
the sad blur home,
my father’s back faced me in my room
with a sound
of birds.
It silenced all gone wrong,
turned me back into a person
who could do things in the world.
(As always all rights reserved. The drawing in this case was done by my father on an iPad a few months before his death.)
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