April 10, 2022

Daily Diary, Day 588: I enjoy putting up poems by my father on Sundays. I've used this one before, but it seemed appropriate to post it again, given how important roses have been on my walks--some of them acting as the last hold-overs from winter, others the new blossoms of spring.

My father, who died years ago, retired in his late fifties (as I did) and began to write poetry. Needless to say, he was an important model for my own post retirement career as a writer. While his medium was poetry, mine fiction, I can see many of the same themes (the effects of family, gender, class, race) in his writing--that I deal with in my own.

This particular poem addresses the fact that his mother was denied the education of her brothers (because she was a girl) and his father was also denied an education so he could work as a salesman in his father's company. This left them completely unprepared when the 1930s Depression hit (and my father was a young man) and the poem expresses the humiliation he felt that they had to depend on the charity of these relatives.

The photo is of a lovely rose I saw on my walk yesterday evening. I hope you enjoy both the rose and the poem.

A RING OF PALE ROSES

Roses marked my mother's cheeks
and ringed the garden of her home.

Mother and Father, Uncle and Brother,
Doctor and Lawyer, circled and loved her,
left her unschooled and vulnerable.

While her brother's world of cars and servants
mocking the poorness of our own,
placed a question mark in me
and an empty place
for shame.

Genius and artistry flowed in my father's veins,
beauty and charm and sparkling wit
honed to an edge by a family
of playwrights and fools.

Unschooled,
marked by his father
for a life of business,
he courted and married my mother,
fathered my family
and failed in the business.

My child voice
was a treble note in the cacophony
of crowds of cousins and uncles and aunts.

My simple mind caught and held
the weary hurt of failure on holiday.

Through their time
they lived on the vitals of each other,
grew sicker and more beautiful with each passing year.

We feasted on meager bones
a ring of pale roses.

--Joseph Locke