Pa
There were times I didn’t really like him.
Heck. I hated him sometimes. The chores.
Hot days in the sun pitching loads of hay.
Cold winter mornings in the barn with the cows.
But there were some days I recall, now
that he’s gone, some days when the sun hung low,
and the hay lay mowed and stacked,
sweet green in the late afternoon sun,
on those days we leaned up against the wheel of
the empty wagon, shoulders practically touching.
We listened to the meadowlarks
trill from the fence posts.
Yup.
Maybe these times are all the water a guy needs
to put down roots and
grow into the rest of his life. Maybe
he don’t need no more.
— Steve Peterson
Notes
This post is a response to an April Poetry Month challenge issued by Mary Lee Hahn at her blog, Poetrepository. She found some family photos this summer at her home place and thought it would be fun to write poems about them this month.
Here’s another photo from the New York Public Library’s digital collection. Another photo taken by Ben Shahn.1 Click on the image and you can learn more about where and when it was taken.
I was struck by the two younger men and the older man partly done with the chores; I say partly done because in the background you can see that there is still some mowing left to do. I began to imagine them as family members and what emerged was a poem about the inevitable conflicts that fathers and sons sometimes feel as they work together, but how much gets passed down despite these conflicts. I tried to write in the voice I imagined for the younger man on the right, at a later time in his life.
- I talked more about his work in the last post. ↩
When he finished,
he passed me the cup,
just as later,
he passed me the farm,
and just as I looked to my own son
and passed on the stories
that made us who we were
and are.
–Kevin
Aw, man, Kevin. This is beautiful. Thank you.
Very nice work, Kevin-liked the way you started with the cup (good observations skills) and let voice flow.
Steve-
Wow. Just wow. This is beautiful. Those last five lines. Breathtaking. You made me cry. So, so perfect.
Thank you so much, Carol. This has been fun. I’m finding different stories emerging from these pictures. I’m learning a lot.
Okay, seeing Kevin’s response to yours and your response to Kevin’s…now you know how I feel with your responses to mine.
I see the “didn’t like him” in that defiant hand-on-hip, but I see the thirst in his eyes for more from his father…perhaps more than his father could (or knew how to) give.
🙂 Yes, Mary Lee, I saw the same look.
Not sure these are the best, but my favorite words were these: “shoulders practically touching” as if that were something to note. I think there were a lot of men of a certain age who suffered from too much work and not enough tenderness.
Steve, I love how you show the conflict between father and son and then a tender, reflective voice comes out. There is a nice turn in this poem that I did not expect when I started reading.
Thank you, Carol. I wanted to TRY to capture a bit of the complexity in these father-son relationships. And I was struck by the look of the young man and the vulnerability of the older man, given that his attention is focussed on the cup.