anon.JPG)
Somewhere in between
My facial hair and the skin that's me
Wanders an itch.
A little marauding tingle
On my chin and up my cheekbone,
Echoing down the mountain;
As the mountain (I am)
I feel it
An,d am it ...
I am the marauding tingle:
I grew it follicle by dandruff flake,
I fed it nail by knuckle brush,
sustained it by my attention –
by hoping it wouldn't be.
I am, I am the father.
And that child,
That twitching trill,
Is me.
* Thanks to Amanda (father-like), David (chapel skies & temple walls), and Damian (porch on Frisco peaks) for making this collage full.
ReplyDeleteOkay, I could be completely misinterpreting this poem, but from what I understand it’s pretty brilliant. I love the way you decided to evoke fatherhood in a pretty refreshing way. I never before recognized the association of something as simple as facial hair with the complex ideas of fatherhood, maturity, and passion of an individual. Instead of focusing on a child, which many tend to do in order to resonate a message about parenting, you alienate the father by comparing his determination to be a good parent to growing a simple hair follicle. Also, I feel like using the word “marauding” to describe the tingle inside of you, as opposed to any other word, was pretty smart. It creates a sense of urgency in the poem, especially since you transform from possessing a little marauding itch, to being the marauding itch. It’s almost as though throughout the poem, the reader is never exactly clear what the identity of the speaker is, if that makes much sense. You change from describing yourself as a father, a burning passion, and finally a child. I feel like that makes your message transcend to the reader because though you are focusing on a specific aspect of fatherhood, the many perspectives you describe can relate to any viewer. This poem was genuinely a delight to read, so bravo!!
ReplyDeleteThanks for your awesome work!
Wesley Smart
That's close to what I meant: the poem is about a guy who has got an itch in his beard. And, as he scratches it, the itch grows ... and he realizes that he is "raising" that itch; that he is the father, and that there is a part of him in that itch.
Delete(our battles and struggles come from within us: they are not exterior forces that come to impede our perfect existence, but challenges that come to show us where we are weak and need to grow. Some men never realize what the world requires of them until they are responsible for a life -- but I feel that we can just as easily find such realizations through more minor revelations, like fathering an itch).
I enjoyed this poem because of the many different connotations of fatherhood expressed in it. Not only does it show the "holy father" through the collage, but also the father of a living child and how we are the "fathers" to parts of our own bodies like our hair follicles. The endless cycle of fatherhood continues as we give birth to new people who grow their own bodies to later give life to another person. I had never really thought of this kind of continuous fatherhood before I read this poem.
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