Tag: parent not expected

When Your Father Isn’t Your Father

Carrie Does Poems
Carrie Does Poems
When Your Father Isn't Your Father
/

Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:

  1. My spoken voice
  2. My raw poems.

Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!

Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.

The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.

When Your Father Isn’t Your Father

This morning when I planted

An apple tree in the backyard again

Because the last had been crushed

By the weight of beaten maple branches, broken fence posts

That had separated our yard

From the neighbor’s barren grass,

Until a storm knocked everything over,

Breaking, breaking, breaking,

I thought of you planting spruces

Wherever you lived, whenever you lived.

Delighting in shaping them

Into proper silhouettes, you’d said,

“Even Santa would approve of these big boys.”

You and I are not blood it turns out because Mom

Got lonely, bored, needy, got something. You never knew.

Firefighter lungs took you away before I learned,

Particulates turning into cancer all around your thick, hobbit chest.

Invading. Invading. Invading. Taking away

What seemed so solid and true.

You told me trees talked to other trees,

Anchored each other into the ground,

Talked to humans, too. Their species

Classification didn’t matter, you said.

It didn’t matter if they weren’t alike.

Maple could love oak could love spruce could love apple

The same way I could love you even when our blood

Turned out not to be the same. We still grew together.

Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.

The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.

Parent Not Expected

Carrie Does Poems
Carrie Does Poems
Parent Not Expected
/

Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:

  1. My spoken voice
  2. My raw poems.

Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!

Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.

The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.

Parent Not Expected

I know nothing about the weather 
I was born in or how the sky whispered 
or stormed. I know nothing 
about the man who helped make me, 
other than his name and he smoked 
cigarettes, constantly, until he got skin 
cancer.  I know his mother had thick, 
dark hair, immigrated here, which was so different 
from the story of my birth certificate
and the ancestors who had been here 
for centuries, taking their time to take 
the land. I know nothing about how 
my mother struggled to hide the secret of me. 
My nose gave me away. My quirky clothes gave me 
away. The way I didn’t fit gave me away. I know nothing 
of the people who came before
me on one side, grandparents, 
great-grandparents, random uncles 
and aunts, their pains. They are unknown 
stories. They are wind that I can’t feel. They are
stars that don’t tell their secrets. 
I am their secret and they are mine.

Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.

The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.

%d bloggers like this: