A Poem for Father's Day

I am home from the onground intensive, a bit tired, but no time for rest this morning.  Soon I will shift to getting ready to leave to drive across the mountain to Bristol, Tennessee to preach at Faith Lutheran.  I expect to write more about the intensive, a bit more, but it won't be this morning.

It's Father's Day, so I thought about posting a poem.  I went to my older poetry folder and found a climate change poem that I had forgotten I wrote, "Word Problems in a Time of Climate Change."  I wrote it in 2019, before I knew that we would be selling the house as early as we did.

In light of the flooding in South Florida in the past week, I am so glad we sold that house.  I've worked for Broward College since 1998, and until recently, classes were canceled only for hurricane warnings, not watches, warnings.  In the past year, we've had several cancellations for extreme flooding.

But it's not a Father's Day poem.  I know that plenty of people will post poems about their own experiences with their fathers, and I haven't written many of those.  In fact, if I've written any of those, I can't find them.

I did write this poem, about parents of grown children.  I think it makes a good Father's Day offering:

Goodnight Moon



Even though the children are grown and gone,
she still sings at night.
Fretful memories haunt the house.
So she does what she always
did, for twenty years, before childhood ended.

She heats the milk in a pan, pours
it into calming Christmas mugs (no matter the season), dusts
each with a sprinkle of nutmeg. She goes
from room to room, checking closet doors
and dimming lights. And she sings
the special lullabies, that repertoire of sleepy songs.

He sits in the armchair in the den
and sips his mug of milk.
The cats linger in his lap
as he leafs through the books his children used to love.