The Poem My Son Wrote Me That I Keep in My Wallet
He's seven. It's four lines. It's the best review I've ever had.
My son is seven, and he wrote me a poem for Father's Day. It is four lines long, written in pencil on a piece of paper torn from a school notebook, and it is the best review I have ever had.
The poem is about the way I hold his hand when we cross the road, and the way I read to him at night, and the way I make the tea in the morning before he wakes up. It is not a good poem by any standard; the metre is off and the rhyme is forced and the spelling is creative. But it is the most accurate thing anyone has ever written about me.
I keep it in my wallet. Not in a frame, not in a drawer, in my wallet, the way you keep a photo of someone you love. I take it out sometimes when I am working late or when I am tired or when I have had a bad day, and I read the four lines and I remember what I am for.
He is seven now and the poem is already starting to fade. The pencil is smudging, the paper is wearing thin, and I know that in a few years it will be unreadable. I have a photocopy of it in the same wallet, in case the original goes, but I don't want the photocopy. I want the one he wrote, the one with the smudged pencil and the torn edge and the spelling that is his and nobody else's.
He will write better poems. He will learn the metre and the rhyme and the spelling, and he will write poems that are technically good. But he will never write a better one, because the first one was the one that mattered. The first one was the one that said 'I see you, and this is what I see'.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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