Poem for love of the alcoholic father

 

 

It is Father’s Day and a time to admit love for the most unlovable of parents, the dearest, the best.

 

My Papa’s Waltz

 

by Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

 

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother’s countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

 

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

 

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

Be gentle when you teach us to live again

Offline most of yesterday, feeling exiled from my cyber community.

But a wonderful day — my neighbour is fostering a baby alpaca rejected by its young mother. Very greedy and big-eyed with a wobbly neck. It has to be fed once every three hours and we all take turns to sit with the little creature.  My housemate is now determined to raise a herd of llamas.

 

Then I went off to my art class, painting away in a studio with sash windows and French doors, looking out on a lemon tree bright with ripe lemons. My art teacher, aged 77 and imperious, standing behind me issuing gnostic instructions: ‘Let your line follow the brush.’ If not, why not? I took several deep breaths and stopped dabbing at the primed canvas. Brushwork is pure Zen. Mixed together brown and blues on my palette and got white paint on my dark-blue sweater, stroking out a grey cloudy sky over a Dutch barn with a red roof. Afterwards, walking back home, I noticed colours as if I had not ever seen them before, ochres and dirty yellows and sage green and all kinds of white and cream and ivory.

 

And I have been reading the unforgettable poetry of the Holocaust, the poems of Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan. Like Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird) as a young Jewish boy in hiding in Poland, Sachs went mute after being interrogted by the Nazis and her poetry seems to emerge from a depth of silence indicating the truly unsayable, unspeaakable. ‘Be gentle when you teach us to live again.‘  On June 20, many writers here in Africa commemorated  International Refugees Day, the displacement of the diaspora. Beginning over in a foreign land, haunted by trauma and loss.

Thinking too as I watch my puppies chase squirrels in the garden and wonder how to capture the exact shade of mauve on the mountains in shadow, of those of us beginning over  in a new life of sobriety, that second chance, the emergence from a pit of degradation. A Lazarus experience, learning how to live free of compulsion and shame. The colour coming back into what had seemed a mindless ashen existence.