You Who Carry
And Other Poems Inspired By My Father
YOU WHO CARRY
You who carry such
Soft beauty and such hardness
Ocean Spray, Iron Wood
Taught holder of extremes
I wanted to be like her back then
On our 2nd or 3rd Firemaker
Experimenting with silence
A stallwart, masculine woman
Leatherman deftly wielded
To harvest small pliable staves
From the Iron Wood
For our young boys bending towards
The bows they longed to craft
To themselves wield
One day, soft and pliant
Stepping lightly upon the forest floor
Bending in the arms of the archer
Hunting, their own and others’ hunger
A song on their lips
Ocean Spray, strong, dark-barked
Light within, your tiny flowers
About to bloom
The day, my father died
He who straddled the era
Of machismo and empathic man
I remember how you cried
The day your own father died
How softly you held us children
How softly you taught my son
To draw his own pliant desire
Draw is own craft deftly
Beautifully strong
No simple thing to be a man
A father, to hold a home and family
Upright, and also bow to the
Tender beauty
The pungent smell of love
Blooming on the vine, the
Tender beauty
The Salty slide of tide
Receding from your sight.
No simple thing to be a daughter,
Mother, sister, son…
So much bending
So much strength
All of us.
You who carry such
Soft beauty and such hardness
Ocean Spray, Iron Wood
THE SLOW CLOSING OF THE DAY’S EYE
The slow closing of the day’s eye
That she might finally rest
After all she has seen and done
A day full of tiredness like the tide
Grateful for the clear, bright words
And also the coming dark, velvet rest
Two birds argue in the seaweed dusk
A sunset blazes pouring it’s honey
As we sit in awe at this ending
As the fruit ripens into the hand
Of the harvester
As the day’s eye closes
Energy is slipping from his body,
Head nodding, Can you hear
The birds singing?
There it is: his bright, clear quest
There is much to notice at the end
I SIT HERE AND LISTEN ON FATHER’S DAY
There are certain sensations
Like the buzzing of the bees in the Ocean Spray
Like the barely-there breeze moving across the surface of still waters
The sparks that float up from the flickering campfire towards the stars
These intermediaries
Reach between one and another
Across the so-called unknown
Sacred Communion
Of my body and the mystery
Oh to live with these sensations trembling at the edges of my vision
Whispering at the place where my skin meets the air
Where my inner ear receives the hum of pollination
Vast regenerative pulse
Oh to sit and listen to this hum
To attend to the rising and falling tide
That liminal place of overlap
At the edge of the ocean
When the breeze rustles the giant maple leaves
And hummingbird hovers right there before me
Why would I not feel your presence?
Why miss that chance to be entranced by the in-between
Of one and another
Across the so-called unknown?
Sacred communion
The Ocean Spray, Iron Wood says this is the day you died, Dad. There on the middle path at Maresia that so few tread but me, Mum, Dan and Bella followed. Mum lead us in gathering a bundle of sacred plants according to an ancient pagan tradition, Dia da Espiga (Day of the Ear of Wheat). She instructed us to pick Scotch Broom, Poppy, Rosemary, Sage and a long “spiga” of wheat (we had only grass!) Later, we gathered with family for a simple meal. A candle flickers beside your photo.
The garden is full of life. The Strawberries abundant, the favas plump, poppies and Oxeye Daisies wave in the warm breeze. The house and land miss you too, dad. The last two pines above were written last year, one before the Ocean Spray bloomed, one right after. In the short span of that tiny blooming, your drank every last dreg of your senses.
From Father’s Day, 2025 “As I walked out into my day, I held this listening close to my heart, slowed down enough to notice what the land was saying, what wanted picking up, what laying down.
This is what my father taught me in his last days: that these senses are not to be squandered, this time with a body, with the bees, the stones, the trees, the waves and breeze, is to be relished.”
Soon the Ocean Spray will be in full bloom and humming away with the story bees, the pollinators deep in the poetry of endings and beginnings.
I still haven’t published a book of poems. This year I hope, in your honour dad, I will.
~ ~ ~
Read the complete posts from last year The Slow Closing of The Day’s Eye and I Sit Here and Listen On Father’s Day