I Found the Poems My Father Never Showed Us
The silent man at our dinner table had been eloquent all along.
My father died owning one good pair of shoes, a wristwatch that lost four minutes a day, and three hundred and eleven poems that none of us knew existed.
We found them in February, six weeks after the funeral, on the day my mother finally agreed to let us empty his side of the steel cupboard. My sister took the shirts because she wanted the smell of them. I took the drawer, because the drawer looked easy.
Bank papers. A spectacle case with a cracked hinge. A tin of loose buttons he had been saving for shirts he no longer owned. And then... pushed flat against the back panel, wrapped in a plastic bag from a grocery shop that closed when I was in school, seven notebooks tied together with the gold string from a sweet box.
I remember thinking they were accounts. He was that kind of man. He kept records of everything: monthly electricity readings, the mileage of a scooter he sold in 2003, which relative gave what at whose wedding, written in columns so straight they looked printed. I sat down on the edge of the bed and opened the first notebook expecting numbers.
The first page said, in his small forward-leaning handwriting, "June 1974. For no one."
My father wrote poems for fifty years and addressed every single one of them to no one.
To understand what this did to me, you have to understand the man at our dinner table. My father spoke maybe forty words a day, and most of those were logistics. Is the gas off. Did the plumber come. His longest recorded speech was directions to my uncle's house in another city, delivered once, flawlessly, never repeated. When I got into college, he shook my hand like a bank manager approving a loan. When I got married, he stood slightly behind my mother and nodded at people. My sister and I used to joke that "pass the salt" was his idea of a paragraph.
We did not joke about it after February.
The early poems are stiff. Rhymes forced into place like a man walking in borrowed shoes, lines about rivers and moral duty that could have come off a school blackboard. But he kept going. That is the part I still cannot get over. No readers, no praise, not one soul who knew, and the man kept going for fifty years. Somewhere in the third notebook, around 1988, something loosens. There is a poem about my mother's hands kneading dough at five in the morning that I have not once managed to read aloud past the fourth line. There is one dated the night his own father died, the ink pressed so hard it embossed the next three pages, like the words were trying to get through the paper and out the other side. And there is one with my name on it. Just my name and my date of birth, and under them twelve lines about holding something so small he became afraid of his own hands.
My father was not a silent man. He was a loud man in a language nobody at our table knew how to hear.
I read for three days straight. I called in sick to work, which I had never done, and I sat on my parents' bed with a pen behind my ear like an examiner, as if being official about it would keep me from falling apart.
My sister came on the second day. We passed the notebooks back and forth like teenagers sharing contraband, saying listen to this, listen to this, no wait, listen to this.
My mother stood in the doorway for a long time before she spoke.
"He used to sit with a pen after dinner," she said. "An hour, sometimes more... I thought he was doing the accounts." Then, quieter, smoothing the bedsheet with one hand: "He showed me a poem once. Before your sister was born. I laughed... Not at him, I was nervous, I didn't know what to say to a poem. He never showed me another one."
Fifty years. That one nervous laugh sat in the room every single time he capped his pen.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make my father a saint, and he was not. He was stubborn. He once did not speak to his own brother for nine years over a property wall. The poems are not the secret goodness of a hard man. They are stranger than that. They are proof that he watched us with a tenderness he could not route through his mouth.
There is a poem about me at seventeen, the night I slammed a door so hard the calendar fell off its nail. In the poem he stands outside my room with his hand raised to knock. The last line is his hand, still raised... going nowhere.
He wrote down the knock he never made.
For months after we found them, I could not write anything myself, and I am supposedly the writer in the family. I had been grieving a man I thought I knew, and now I had to start over and grieve a stranger who, it turned out, knew me completely. It rearranged everything. Eventually I stopped circling and wrote about the grief directly instead of around it, and I found that most of what I believed about family had to be relearned from a dead man's notebooks: that love in some houses is not spoken, it is filed. Kept in columns. Tied with string from a sweet box and addressed, for safety, to no one.
In April I did something he would never have permitted. I typed out the poem about my mother's hands and entered it into a monthly poetry contest under his full name, all three initials, the way he signed cheques. He did not win. I laughed alone in my kitchen when the results came, because I could hear exactly what he would have said: good, now stop wasting the postage. Winning would have meant attention, and attention, to him, was a form of debt.
But I also posted one poem on a community wall for poets, the very first one, June 1974, the stiff one about the river, the one addressed to no one. It felt right that his clumsiest poem should be the one that finally got readers, fifty years late. A woman I have never met commented that her own father had died leaving a locked drawer she still had not opened. I typed and deleted several wise things... In the end I just wrote: open it.
The seventh notebook is one third empty. It sits on my desk now, next to his watch, which still loses four minutes a day and which I refuse to correct, because a watch that runs slow was somehow the most honest thing about a man who was always, secretly, keeping time.
Some nights I sit with that unfinished notebook and try to write something worth all his silence. I have not managed it yet. But I have learned to start the way he started, every time, for fifty years, with nobody watching.
I write the date first. Then, for no one, I begin.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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