Sonnet for My Father

For my father's birthday, I wrote him poems, although I'm not a poet. I write novels and serial fiction. This year I wrote him a sonnet based on my earliest memory. When my sister and I were in our cribs for the night, my father read us bedtime poems from his Notre Dame college anthology. My earliest memory is him reading "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins to coax us to sleep. My actual memory is the first line, "Glory be to God for dappled things." I used to hear those words playing in the sandbox. I heard them riding my bicycle leaf-shadowed streets. All my life I've heard that line every few weeks or months. While writing the sonnet, though, I noticed that I always heard the line in his voice when he was a young father, half-way through law school. Several times I told my father this was my earliest memory, but he didn't remember it or the poem.

His birthday was March 29th. This year, a week earlier, he fell and suffered a concussion. A busy emergency room sent him home. Two days later, he was admitted with a "slow brain bleed." A week later I joined my mother at a rehab center where he tried so hard to swallow, his neck seized up. I lent my support while my mother went through the process of following his medical directive--no IVs or any other artificial means to extend physical life.  In the days before he died, my mother read the sonnet to him. Once, I read it to him. Had I written it for Christmas, he would have parsed it carefully and debated whether any deviations in the meter added interest or not. Yet while I was with him, he and I shared phases of appreciation and reconciliation. He had always conceded I wrote well, but disapproved of my so-call "work," being something that provided no financial reward, and in my case, not even a flickering of recognition.  Yet at the end, we agreed any two-year-old who loves and repeats throughout her life "Glory be to God for dappled things," may not have had been suited to anything else. Here then is the sonnet:

Before The Little Match Girl gladly dies,

Before The Brothers Grimm, bed time meant poems;

Then Notre Dame invoked quatrains and sighs,

Divine as prayers received at heaven’s throne.

And still I hear your voice, buoyant and clear,

In “Pied Beauty,” Glory Be, Dappled Things,

Imagine, father, all we must revere,

Possessing every blessing true Faith brings.

If infants could embrace the Holy Word,

Too young to know what they can never know,

How seldom then would life appear absurd.

No way would I attempt immortal prose;

Instead, each tale untold I can’t resist.

Against all odds, I strive and never win.

Forlorn, estranged, in truth, I will persist.

If you rewind, you’ll see my joy begin!

Recall how hard against the wind we’d run

Becoming, you and I, wild boundless fun.