So my dad is a poet. By day he is an attorney and yadda yadda that is great but by love and passion he is a poet. He is having 2 books published this year, one by Dos Madres a small but wonderful local press company here and another by Wordpress later in the year.
Last night he had his first reading in quite a while. It was wonderful. We were in the tea room of this delectable local bakery. 30 people together quiet and listening to his words. He spoke smoothly and with emotion. Real emotion, the kind of emotion that my sister and I looked at each other and got tears in our eyes. Beauty. I remember when I was a kid listening to my dads poems. I have every single one of his chat books from the 70's with his poems in it, they sit nicely on my bookshelf all in a row.
So life is a poem. My poem has included so much beauty and laughter, it has traced the lines of many pages and still after every word there is a smile. A joyous poem perhaps.
Here is my dad reading a poem he wrote for our wedding:
Here is one of my fathers poems. Read it, then go back and read it again. When you are done the second time think about it and perhaps read it again.
Walrus
It slips from my heart
Like the walrus slips
From the ice into the sea
Diving deep to dig for oysters
In the mud with his ivory tusks
But it always returns
I feel those wet flippers
And the pain from two huge tusks
Pulling that dark slippery wrinkled form
Back onto my heart
And I am frightened
Until I feel the warmth from his blubber
Which the Eskimos eat
And burn in their lamps
And I want to live and receive light
From him too
I shake again
When the walrus moves
Knowing he is hungry
And must go
I cry wait
As he slides into the water
And I hope for
The day
When my arms
will be strong enough
To wrap around and hold
The broad neck
Of this mustached whale horse
to ride him into the dark
Into the warmer water
To dig in the mud and watch
For polar bears and kayaks
By Gerry Grubbs
No comments:
Post a Comment