"Late Poem to My Father"
Sharon Olds.
Suddenly I thought of you
as a child in that house, the unlit rooms
and the hot fireplace with the man in front of it,
silent. You moved through the heavy air
in your physical beauty, a boy of seven,
helpless, smart, there were things the man
did near you, and he was your father,
the mold by which you were made. Down in the
cellar, the barrels of sweet apples,
picked at their peak from the tree, rotted and
rotted, and past the cellar door the creek ran and ran, and something was
not given to you, or something was
taken from you that you were born with, so that
even at 30 and 40 you set the oily medicine to your lips
every night, the poison to help you
drop down unconscious. I always thought the
point was what you did to us
as a grown man, but then I remembered that
child being formed in front of the fire, the
tiny bones inside his soul
twisted in greenstick fractures, the small
tendons that hold the heart in place
Father with child
cartoonists-6
Image taken from page 247 of 'A Run round the Empi...snapped. And what they did to you
you did not do to me. When I love you now,
I like to think I am giving my love
directly to that boy in the fiery room,
as if it could reach him in time.
"Late Poem to My Father", a poem by Sharon Olds, carries us on a insightful journey through forgiveness and acceptance. The author's ultimate destination is understanding - the understanding of her father through his life as a child.
Initially, the title seemed to suggest th)at the father had passed away. The poet, it seemed, wished to express final thoughts to her father though it world...