Here's my free verse poem about my dad. I find it sad that he too wrote poetry, but none about his wife or family. I figure sometime soon I'm going to write poetry about Mom and slip it into the book of poetry he wanted me to transcribe for him. Anyway, here's my poem about him:
GONE
MAN
She saw you, she thought.
The bright, quicksilver girl
With moonlight in her eyes.
You were her prince, her knight
You rocked her in your arms
And she saw possibilities in your eyes.
You shared corners of you
No one else had ever seen.
But not all.
Some, you kept back
For those
Silent green spaces you shared with no one.
She was your pole star
The maker of your tribe,
The designer of your life,
But you began to belittle her efforts
To paint over the gold with brown.
You shared a gypsy existence.
Babies multiplied
Dollars did not.
But the you's of you were happy
Until you were not.
We came.
A quiz
A conundrum.
A trouble in diapers.
All too soon you were
Dragging us across the planet
By the tiny arms.
Run! Faster! You're too slow.
Stop whining.
I'll give you something to cry about.
Until we ground you into place with inertia.
We, our needs, became your anchors.
Chaining you down
To a day long and dreary
None of our antics seemed to
Waken your smile.
A dearth of joy.
Only the mistakes.
Punctuated with watermelon seeds
And a rare day on the slopes.
Once, when I danced on your shoes,
Embarrassed,
While other little princesses
Chattered away.
I was never enough.
Good enough.
Smart enough.
Charming enough.
You
were always there,
The
stony monolith,
Seemingly
impervious to
Wind
or water
The
battleship
Plowing
through the waves
On a course you set.
No
plea went unchallenged,
No
hope unexamined in
Fine
detail beneath the
microscope
Of
fatherly castigation.
Hour
on hour,
One
foot and then the other,
You
flailed from us all
Broken
compasses, all lazy chairs,
Any
witless falsehoods,
Any
unworthy dreams or
Uncomfortable
questions.
Determination
built you.
Your
children would not
Deviate
from the pattern
You
set out with
Knife-sharp
edges.
Somewhere
along the way
You
lost all of that.
The
ship sailed without you,
Left
you ashore and wondering
How
it came to be
That
your kingdom had shrunk
To
the size of one woman.
You
raged at the too tight lack.
You wanted to punch out
The other side.
The search eluded you.
Day in and day gone,
You ached for a place to stretch
Wings and walls and ideas
But they only held you inside.
One by one we escaped through a hole in your curtain wall.
You
couldn’t fill the breach,
Couldn't go out the same way.
Couldn't see the good inside.
Couldn't find the good outside.
Stuck.
You
searched and searched,
But
nothing came.
You
hoped you would be strong enough
To
keep the enemy
Without.
But
he entered anyway.
Entered
and stole,
And
took and carved away your ‘self.’
Walls
of you fell and rolled and drifted,
Down
into rushing rivers of
Manic
activity, frantic,
But
no more fulfilling.
Still
the enemy chipped away.
Chipped
until you began to let go,
Fingers
aching from clutching
At what you had and
What you were afraid you couldn't keep.
You watched her watching you,
Knowing she knew your lacks,
Knowing you had become
Less
To the quicksilver girl.
You hated those lacks.
You hated the sorrow in her eyes.
You hated knowing
She knew how you failed
Yourself and her.
Your edges grew hard and sharp.
Hers sharpened in tandem
To find
That you'd hidden
All the you's you'd once
Shared with her
Along with the ones you never had.
She wept.
You raged.
You looked for other treasure boxes
To hold the bits
You no longer shared.
But none came.
How
strange to see you wither
As
I slowly waltz in the flaccid circle
Of your once-strong arms and watch.
The
wind suddenly carving into
Your
bastions and buttresses
And
you,
Lost
behind your eyes somewhere
Unable
to call for help
Unable
to find the words
To
define your rage, to open the
Bars
of your mind.
And your quicksilver girl,
So road-weary,
Defeated
Trudges along,
Pulling your leading strings.
You yank at those tethers,
Trying to prove you don't
Need them.
But you do.
You
see us out here,
Getting
away with things
You
never sanctioned
And
powerless to stop them,
Your
rage builds.
If
only you could recall
Where
you put the keys to your mind.
If only your mind remembered the dance
Your feet still keep beat to.
If
only you could go home,
Back
to the simple place
Where
deer came to drink and
You
ran through green silences.
But
you can’t go.
Not anymore.
Too many people hold the strings.
Hole you hostage in this dank, hot Hades.
Distress.
You clutch at the gone-ness
But can't quite reach.
No one will help you.
No one sees the hollowed-out inside of you.
You see with blank eyes.
Glimpses.
Flickers.
A shuffling waltz.
A fond see-you-later.
That faint, lost little smile
Barely there.
Time for bed--for the
Recklessness of sleep
For the practice death
The facing of dreams lost and forgotten
Your
eyes shutter.
Your
unknowable heart shutters.
Your
lips shutter.
Your
mind shutters.
And
you have
become
A
gone man.
Sand
sifting away
Into
the wind,
All
that’s left
Of
the monolith.
Someday,
You’ll
be found.
But
which you?
Your quicksilver girl wonders.
And I wonder.
Who will you be when the shackles fall away?
©2021
by H. Linn Murphy
Nonets are the poem for the day. If you want to know how to write one, go here. And now for my double Nonet poem:
So many buried nuggets extant
Bits of grit rubbing places raw
I tried once to remedy
The lack, but already
His mind had retrenched
Into haziness
Too dang late
I wept
Dad
Pearl
Someday
From the grit
A gorgeous stone
Will grow and fill up
Our lives with nacred gems
Of thought and feeling and rich
Treasures that should have grown in life
Without the grit to mar and annoy
©2021
by H. Linn Murphy
