Saturday, June 14, 2014

A POEM FOR FATHER'S DAY






In Dreams Gone By, Mixed Media with Color Copy Transfers, Spray Paint & Colored Pencils. © by Ruth Zachary


My Father’s Hands


After he passed, it distressed me that I could not
remember his hands. I looked among old family photos
he had taken of others, but not of his hands.
He had developed his photos in makeshift darkrooms.
They possessed a quality of candid truth, functional
composition; beautiful, although he would not
have called them art though I could see that they were.

When I was small, his hands felt lean, hard, rough
and calloused, knuckles etched in black, nails stained,
mechanic’s hands; displayed with pride;
working hands for honest work.
Long ago, with my small hand in his, I skipped along
beside him to do some task, to fix the car, or plant trees.
Once I led him to a meadowlark’s nest.  Another time
he showed me how to make a whistle out of slippery elm.

His hands at rest always held a cigarette, while he told
make believe stories of his life, me at his feet,
absorbing his words. Sometimes he stopped the car
on the way to Grandma’s house to pick wildflowers for her,
and stopped again on the way home to pick more
for my mother, as we returned, fists full of blossoms.

We moved miles away. He worked in a factory.
There was that photo of him with my mother,
in her church dress, and  him in his one suit,
like Michigan Gothic, standing in front of the camera,
for its timed exposure, his last photo of them.
His wrists hung too far out of their sleeves, still
farmer’s hands, though farming and auto repair had failed him.
He recorded my growing daughters with his camera,
and sat with them, holding a cigarette, repeating history.

Later I  re-married, and he moved across the road.
By then, his hands were thick as roots, still planted deep
in Michigan soil. He did not notice my own hands,
which, once long and thinly boned, had become muscled
and strong, nails stained with printer’s ink, from creating
etchings, a career  he could never understand, even though
my hands had clearly sprouted from those hands of his.      


                                     Ruth Zachary 031806-011314

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