Happy Mothers Day to the Mother's Having to be Fathers

FATHERS DAY

Every year
as children bustle about
buying cards, presents, making cakes,
I take the day off.

Oh, I have plenty of fathers,
just no urgency
to celebrate any of them
on this particular day of the year.

There is the one who
created me,
a wandering nomad
still perched in the hills
of Southern California.

After 40 years he calls me,
or had my cousin tell me to call him,
“I’ve been praying the Holy Spirit over you
since the day I tossed out the bottle”.

A relief that was
after the stories I had been told
about the man I “should never let
out of Pandora’s Box”.

The father who raised me
now lives alone,
crippled by the youth he so desperately
went out in search of.

He taught me everything I know,
an English professor,
stunt pilot, motocross champion,
his musical talent led him to a place
I could not bring him back out of.

A step dad of my mother’s choosing
says it was I who sent him away,
all my fault as I was the one to
discover his infidelities
in drawers, on cell phone bills, and tattered napkins.

So father’s day is to me
what independence might be to America
I have released each of them
to their choices,
a bustling of fireworks in a sky
created by the one Father
whom I know will never let me down. Allison P. Adams 2/14/2011

The Poem that Kept Me Up All Night- Cathy Smith Bowers

The first night on Ossabaw, we had the treat to be read to by North Carolina's Poet Laureate. Cathy Smith Bowers charmed us with her Southern voice and love for words and sounds.

I have provided a link to her youtube video reading. Enjoy..she is a HOOT!

After her reading, we went off on our own, to experience the sights and sounds of Ossabaw. That night I was up most of the night, writing this poem. After the workshop, we were invited to read aloud in the tent at the Savannah Book Festival.

Thank you Ossabaw and especially Cathy Smith Bowers for opening my soul.

Last night
a vault of memories opened,
North Carolina’s Poet Laureate
holding the key.

“I write poetry,”
she said,
“to save the few morsels
of tenderness I can remember
from my childhood.”

These poems
stitched from moments in time,
abiding images
she called them,
binding a thread of words
to be woven together
to make sense of it all.

I lie here at 5 am,
comets of moments
shooting through my brain,
a freeing of so many years
locked in the darkness.

The encroaching sun’s glow
illuminates thoughts
scribbled on my pad
on this cold
February morning.

A magical island,
unspoiled paradise
words and sentences hanging
among moss draped branches.

I have been here twelve hours,
a lifetime of words
cocooned within my heart.
I wish only,
to release them,
tiny butterflies of truth
set free into the wilds of Ossabaw. Allison Puccetti Adams 2011