It's been a while since I've done a verse writing challenge. I enjoy them. That's the trouble. I've had tedious and toilsome business to take care of this winter. Not much time for enjoying. It's not really writer's block but, when tedious business is going on, my creative brain tends to fixate on getting the tedious business done and out of the way before it lets itself work on things that are fun.
So when the toil reached a stage of near-completion at which some time for enjoyment seemed indicated, the first writing challenge I came across was one from DVerse: Write a song, or poem, or something, in celebration of a father or fathers, incorporating three different titles of popular songs addressed to fathers.
Well...obviously my take on "Papa Don't Preach" is radically different from Madonna Ceccone's. My poem is not closely related to the other two songs, either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2CC78TUmAM (Warning: James Brown. Not one of his worst, but includes enough yelling and swearing to prove it's JB.)
My father was an ordained minister who never, after I was born at least, stood in a pulpit or preached any kind of church service. He believed in doing things in the oldfashioned Green way, doing a lot of hard work by hand. He did not want our road to be accessible to motor traffic, particularly, and growled about erosion when neighbors widened and flattened what had been a trail into a rough narrow private road, but when erosion caused somebody's vehicle to scrape on a rock he might go out and flatten the rock with a twelve-pound hammer. Motor vehicles emit more pollutants when they are damaged. If people had to drive motor vehicles, Dad would growl, they ought to take care of the things.
His generation believed that, as Shel Silverstein said, "this world is rough, and if a man's going to make it, he's got to be tough." They cultivated the Emotional Intelligence, before either the phrase or the neurological insight behind it had been discovered, of processing thought through the calculating left brain without giving themselves much chance to feel pain or, in many cases, pleasure. They prized being unsympathetic to anything resembling weakness. "He was big and thin and grey and old, and I looked at him, and my blood ran cold" was the way they wanted to grow old. Feo, fuerte y formal. "Feeling" was strictly women's business. If a polio survivor wanted to walk, or work, or get well, he had to push those growing arms and legs through a lot of pain.
The gender polarity they believed in made it difficult for fathers to love daughters, though of course some did. When, for whatever reasons, little girls did spend time with their fathers, there were many benefits to being a "Daddy's Girl" but also some losses. There was a tradition of "Daddy's Girls" being treated like boys even to the extent of being given nicknames that sounded like boys' names, dressed in jeans, taught to bait their own fishhooks and throw fast pitches and ridicule all the typical "girls' things." My parents seriously tried to move beyond that kind of thinking. I didn't have to be like a boy just because Mother worked, until she became too ill, and Dad did the housekeeping. I was Daddy's Girl. I could do a few "boys' things" and still appreciate dolls, cooking, and needlework.
But, in order to be the polio survivor and old-style drill sergeant he was, my Daddy had acquired several extra layers of toughness. He wasn't mean or violent. He was a Virginia gentleman...but Virginia gentlemen were always competing and comparing themselves, and most of them just showed respect by staying away from Dad. Why go where the comparisons are never going to come out in your favor?
Truth be told, we children preferred to stay away from Dad too. He was not a child abuser or anything icky like that. He was just impossible to please, or like, or enjoy hanging out with. He wanted to teach his children things, especially the two older ones, who were supposed to be brilliant. (He didn't seem to demand quite so much of my natural sister, whose I.Q. was supposed to be merely normal.) He wanted us to be smarter and wiser and braver and generally more "mature" than the grown men who didn't enjoy his company, and was bitterly disappointed by any reminder that we were, what, five years old?
Like the joke about the "egghead" who said, "My kid got off to a slow start. It took him two years to learn to read, but now that he's started he's getting on well..."
"Two years? That poor little fellow. How old was he when he finally learned how to read?"
"Why, I said it took him two years--obviously, he was two!"
I was not quite four when the'rents caught me reading, and although it was strictly a matter of my eyes maturing ahead of schedule--the books I understood were the picture books for four-year-olds--I've never completely lived that down. The worst part was that my brother, whose actual understanding of what he read and listened to was more precocious than mine, developed the ability to see printed letters clearly on a normal little-boy schedule; he could spell out "I love you Mom" with magnetic letters on the refrigerator, at three, but he didn't sit down and read full-length books until he was eight. Dad used to yell at him for "being too stubborn and stupid" to read books.
"Sensitive" was among the last things men Dad's age wanted to be called, and the last things anyone ever thought of calling him. Nevertheless, he had High Sensory Perceptivity. They used to want to let the trait be noticeable only in terms of their being able to hit targets normal people couldn't see.
So...The earliest English poems had four downbeats (stressed syllables) to a line, varying numbers of unstressed syllables in between. The popular "song for Dad" mentioned in the poem below has this metre--though the poem certainly does not fit the tune of the song.
Papa, don't preach, for the people can't bear it.
Your path is stony and high and steep.
The people never will want to hear it,
Will cling to sins, make the angels weep.
You beat down weakness readily
As you'd beat down a rattlesnake
Or break the rocks to build the road
That you had never wished to make.
You thrashed the sickly little child
Off the prison of your soul
And kicked his traces off your feet
And rose up tall and strong and whole.
In an abstract way you always knew
That common people's inner men
Were not the sort of men that you
Were. You forgot, time and again.
Papa, don't take no mess--there's no need,
Never a need for a threatening hand.
Those who see you use axe or hammer
Are quickly gone, or yours to command.
--My father was tougher and grimmer than Odin.
All childish pleasures withered away
Where his shadow fell. We should be wiser than elders,
Earn Bachelor of Science degrees in a day!
If I was afraid, I could count on my father
For derision, a scolding, a taunt, and a sneer:
Why did I not turn the runaway horses?
How could a child of his know fear?
And for many years I wondered in silence,
Having learned well not to ask him why
The song for Dad, the one he demanded
I learn, was "Love Is Like a Butterfly."
Priscilla, thank you so much for sharing insights about your father. He may not fit the bill of what is expected of a father these days, but what matters is he was a loving father and stood tall amongst the men of his generation. A heartfelt tribute.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds to me, that he might have been trying to hard to fit a mold that was given him... still he did his best and it sounds like the tenderness was always there...
ReplyDeleteI love that surprise at the end...the song he demanded was "Love is like a Butterfly" :)
ReplyDelete