Heather Babcock's Blog - Posts Tagged "love"

A Poem for My Father by Heather Babcock

My father was born on Atlas Avenue
St. Clair and Dufferin
During the third year of the Great Depression.
My father loved animals
-his mother hated them-
His pet was a medium sized turtle who lived in his backyard.
One day my father came home from school to find that the turtle was gone.
“Ran away,” his mother said.
So my father ran away too -
A white lie about his birth date and he was a sailor
Spinning dials in the belly of a ship.
Older men hooked their medals and pretty girls pinned their dreams onto him
Until he got so thirsty and tired that the Navy doctor said
“You’ll lose an eye or a leg if you keep going.”
So my father traded his white bell bottomed uniform, a pet monkey and the sempiternal seas
For a collared shirt and tie, three quarrelsome women and syringes fat with insulin.
It was during the third year of the millennial financial crisis when the jelly bean shaped doctor with the jack-in-the-box voice said
“Your father is brain dead and he will never wake up.”
As I looked upon my father –
White cotton pads over his eyes,
A machine filling his body like a balloon –
I thought about the Navy, the turtle and the monkey
And I wondered about my father’s fears and what the music inside his head had sounded like
And I thought:
I’ll never know the name of the girl
My father first kissed.

(Written by Heather Babcock, 2015)