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
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