My Father's Love Letters by Yusef Komunyakaa

Last week's poem was a little dark in tone, and this one is definitely dark as well. It's a treasure I recently discovered, but I've known about the author for a long time. Yusef Komunyakaa is an American poet best known for his poem about the Vietnam war memorial, "Facing It." Today, however, I'm featuring a slightly lesser-known poem of his that's just as powerful.

My Father's Love Letters

On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,
& ask me to write a letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
Taller than men. He would beg,
Promising to never beat her
Again. Somehow I was happy
She had gone, & sometimes wanted
To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou
Williams' "Polka Dots & Moonbeams"
Never made the swelling go down.
His carpenter's apron always bulged
With old nails, a claw hammer
Looped at his side & extension cords
Coiled around his feet.
Words rolled from under the pressure
Of my ballpoint: Love,
Baby, Honey, Please.
We sat in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences . . .
The gleam of a five-pound wedge
On the concrete floor
Pulled a sunset
Through the doorway of his toolshed.
I wondered if she laughed
& held them over a gas burner.
My father could only sign
His name, but he'd look at blueprints
& say how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man,
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, would stand there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.

Many people's first experience with love is not a positive, "functional" one (when it comes to love and family, is there really such a thing as functional anyway?). Interestingly enough, the reader sees the destructive, failed love story between two people--the father and mother--through the emotionally confused eyes of the child. This adds a new complication the story. It is not just about a man and a woman's abusive relationship. It is about how that relationship looks through the eyes of their child, caught in between. It is about the strange, destructive love so many children watch with confusion and torn emotions.

The love in this poem is brutal, dysfunctional, and yet somehow tender: the imagery of sunsets and flowers is very much at odds with the "quiet brutality" of both the speaker's father and the room in which he or she writes. What does all this warring imagery accomplish? The poem expresses that fearful push and pull of love between something violent and destructive and something tender and almost redemptive.

The last three lines hit a very personal chord with me. The speaker describes his father's clumsy effort to find the right words and overcome his own illiteracy in a way that echoes a larger theme we can all relate to: the aching difficulty of trying to express our own emotions in words. The father's lack of literacy or eloquence only highlights a difficulty of expression present in even the most well-read.

I hope you love this poem half as much as I do. Take a look at another "love" poem; this one is ambiguous and confuses me a little, which I think goes very well with this week's theme. Read for yourself and discover what you think is the meaning behind Always Pity.