Today I'll wear blue to honor my father:
jeans, a perfectly medium blue shirt,
blue socks—and unlike him, I'll even
thread a blue belt around my waist
and my sneakers shall be blue. He
would not approve or understand
belts, shoes which weren't leather.
Such a cheery man! Why fixate on
blue, the color of sadness, brooding,
moping, the heart's coldness? Yet,
he painted his room blue too. When I
wanted to know him better, I would
open his closet, walk my fingers through
his clothes: blue, blue, blue, blue.
I remember when quite small his
'modern' patterned shirt, pink bars
set on black. Where did that man go?
Back then did he hide his blue heart?
98/100
100 poems in 100 days
Wow. This one feels so layered and hits you right in the feels at the end. Really powerful, one of your best I think.
As you may have garnered from my HBP pieces last year, my perception of my father is colored by the final five years of his life when he went into a mental tailspin. It occurs to me that it was like a recurrence of cancer but an emotional cancer. He’d had brief bouts before but they were easy to discount. I was young, and those periods of a few months were offset by years and years of cheeriness. Only toward the end when it lasted years and I was much older observing him more closely did I suspect he had harbored this all his life.
Yeah, it’s remarkable how well he tried to hide it and how beautiful of a testament of his love for his family.