Sometimes the mind drops a memory like a thud into an otherwise perfectly normal day. You might be washing breakfast dishes or riding your bike, when—Wham—the time-machine reverses. But it isn’t simply an old movie that reruns across your inner eye. It is that, but it is also a surprising connection to the present…an insight into who you’ve become.
DADDY
Winter dances in the church hall
families and a band
fiddler and a square-dance caller
piano guitar accordion player
shirts that matched (or not).
Swinging my legs
from a chair, one ringing the dance floor
I watched couples spin like tops
to a polka do-si-do and sashay
in a square and
women peeking over men’s shoulders
as couples smoothly floated by
my hard folding-chair
and I counted one-two-three
to a swirling waltz.
Daddy stood in front of me
took my hands to lift me down
my head a bit past his waist
my feet on his we glided
to the song’s cadence
one of the haunting war time
melodies beautifully sad.
I did not have a word for yearning
yet felt loss and longing
a prescience perhaps.
Writing a poem begins with an action, image, emotion, memory or idea, but by its last line, it discovers something deeper. Ideally, it elicits from the reader a memory and insight in his or her own life. Even if you’ve never experienced a country dance in the 1940s or ’50s, I hope this poem stirs a memory and perhaps an ah ha moment of how that memory awakens a new awareness for you.
Thank you, Bruce Kauffman, Quintessentially Canadian editor, Devour: Art & Lit Canada, for selecting my poem “Daddy” for inclusion in the Summer 2020 issue (page 91).
Kathryn MacDonald 