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Friday
For Father’s Day, which is Sunday, here’s one of the sweetest father-and-son poems that I know. I once heard poet Li-Young Lee read it at the college where I used to teach.
In the act of removing a splinter from his wife’s hand, the poet recalls a moment when his father did the same for him. He associates his father’s hands with tenderness, whether they were cupping his son’s face in his hands or bringing them together to pray for him. Perhaps the “flames of discipline/ he raised above my head” are an allusion to the Pentecostal flames since Lee’s remarkable father eventually turned to the ministry.
From a distance, it appears the father is “planting something in a boy’s palm,/ a silver tear, a tiny flame,” and in fact he is. We know that what he has planted has grown to fruition years later as Lee shows the same tenderness towards his wife.
The calming effect of the father—the adult Lee can “hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer”—keeps his son from resorting to melodrama (“Death visited here!”). Instead, the son returns to his father a gift of the same order that he has received: he tenderly kisses him.
The Gift
By Li-Young Lee
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.
I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.
Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.
Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.