By Christina E. Petrides
PROMPT — If only ...
Did you end up like your dad?
Spending evenings
staring blankly at a television,
nonspeaking at dinner,
blending into an old recliner,
wrinkled work shirt merged
with sallow floral velvet?
His was not satisfied silence,
but brute muteness, animal fatigue,
too abused and disabused of hope
to voice any complaint.
You were so earnest,
struggling against the current,
directly confronting hardships
I had only known from dystopian novels,
that I (until then) would not quite allow
existed so close by.
Diligently you had pulled yourself up,
over the rim of that childhood pit,
into possibilities and experiences
beyond your family’s understanding.
I still admire your strength.
You bore marks. Small as they were,
their worth grew as I looked at your
kind, bland mother and sagging father—
and painfully recognized our differences.
How my family, for all its flaws,
didn’t reek of resignation.
How we were relatively spendthrift,
simply could afford nice things;
I had never had to do without
to the bone-scraping extent you knew.
Terrified of penury, of the barefoot grit
which brought you and yours
to bare-walled middle-class subsistence,
a painful veneer of solvency,
I wrote that letter. Was I weak?
A quarter century on, have you
joined your father in that dim corner?
Or does he remain there only in my heart
as a poignant symbol of loss?
American Southerner Christina E. Petrides lived in South Korea for 6.5 years. She has published four children's books, one massive Russian to English nonfiction translation, and a poetry collection. She writes from Evans, GA. Her website is: www.christinaepetrides.com
Comments