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The Same City
By Terrance Hayes
The rain falling on a night
    in mid-December,
I pull to my father’s engine
    wondering how long I’ll remember
this. His car is dead. He connects
    jumper cables to his battery,
then to mine without looking in
    at me and the child. Water...
Lines to My Father
By Countee Cullen
The many sow, but only the chosen reap;
Happy the wretched host if Day be brief,
That with the cool oblivion of sleep
A dawnless Night may soothe the smart of grief.

If from the soil our sweat enriches sprout
One meagre blossom for our...
Father’s Day for Gay Boys
By Dan Vera
One beside another—brothers
Seven diviners
of what lies beyond the truths we have uncovered.
One makes three, then four, then more
until we move beyond mere numbers.
There is thunder over the city tonight
and of the million hearts we may never see
here in the circle...
All My Pretty Ones
By Anne Sexton
Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart
where you followed our mother to her cold slumber;
a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,
leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber
you from the residence you could not afford:
a gold key, your half...
Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be
By Ross Gay
The way the universe sat waiting to become,
quietly, in the nether of space and time,

you too remain some cellular snuggle
dangling between my legs, curled in the warm

swim of my mostly quietest self. If you come to be—
And who knows?—I wonder,...
The Giant Water Bug
By Douglas Florian
The giant water bug can lug
His eggs upon his back.
He gives them extra care up there
And guards them from attack.
The mother glues them to the dad,
And on his way they stay.
But does he ever get a card
Or gift on Father's...
Bewitched Playground
By David Rivard
Each could picture probably
with great care his brother drawing
the corded string of a watered silk bag
and mumbling to Basho above the keepsake
pay your respects to mother's white hair
now your eyebrows look a little white too
but all have turned instead to...
His Stillness
By Sharon Olds
The doctor said to my father, “You asked me
to tell you when nothing more could be done.
That’s what I’m telling you now.” My father
sat quite still, as he always did,
especially not moving his eyes. I had thought
he would rave if...
Supernatural Love
By Gjertrud Schnackenberg
My father at the dictionary-stand
Touches the page to fully understand
The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand

His slowly scanning magnifying lens,
A blurry, glistening circle he suspends
Above the word “Carnation.” Then he bends

So near his eyes are magnified and blurred,
One finger on...
On my First Son
By Ben Jonson
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.
Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could...
- Living
- Death
- Parenthood
- Sorrow & Grieving
- Father's Day
- Stanza Forms
- Couplet
- Types/Modes
- Elegy
- Epigram
- Grief
- + 4 more
The Lost Pilot
By James Tate
Your face did not rot
like the others—the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot

like the...
Carpentry
By Carl Dennis
Carpenters whose wives have run off
Are sometimes discovered weeping on the job.
But even then they don’t complain of their work.

Whitman’s father was a carpenter.
He was so happy hammering houses
That he jumped with a shout from the roof beam
And rolled with...
Father and Son
By Delmore Schwartz
Father:
On these occasions, the feelings surprise,
Spontaneous as rain, and they compel
Explicitness, embarrassed eyes——

Son:
Father, you’re not Polonius, you’re reticent,
But sure. I can already tell
The unction and falsetto of the sentiment
Which gratifies the facile mouth, but springs
From no felt, had,...
The Little Boy Lost
By William Blake
Father, father, where are you going
       O do not walk so fast.
Speak father, speak to your little boy
       Or else I shall be lost,

The night was dark no father was there
       The child was wet with dew.
The mire was deep,...
The Cane-Bottom’d Chair
By William Makepeace Thackeray
In tattered old slippers that toast at the bars,
And a ragged old jacket perfumed with cigars,
Away from the world and its toils and its cares,
I’ve a snug little kingdom up four pair of stairs.

To mount to this realm is a...
To Her Father with Some Verses
By Anne Bradstreet
Most truly honoured, and as truly dear,
If worth in me or ought I do appear,
Who can of right better demand the same
Than may your worthy self from whom it came?
The principal might yield a greater sum,
Yet handled ill, amounts but...
Youth
By James Wright
Strange bird,
His song remains secret.
He worked too hard to read books.
He never heard how Sherwood Anderson
Got out of it, and fled to Chicago, furious to free himself
From his hatred of factories.
My father toiled fifty years
At Hazel-Atlas Glass,
Caught among girders that...
A Toast to the Men
By Edgar Albert Guest
Here’s to the men! Since Adam’s time
      They’ve always been the same;
Whenever anything goes wrong,
      The woman is to blame.
From early morn to late at night,
      The men fault-finders are;
They blame us if they oversleep,
      Or if...
The Hospital Window
By James L. Dickey
I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.
I drop through six white floors
And then step out onto pavement.

Still feeling my father ascend,
I start to cross the firm...
Pa’s Soft Spot
By D. A. Ellsworth
“All folks hev some soft spot,”
      Ma uster say,
“Somethin’ or ’nother
      Comes out some day
Comes out ’fore they know it,
      Jest like ez not.”
’N’en us kids’d say, “Ma,
      What’s your sof’ spot?”

An’ we’d keep a plaguin’,
      Till ma’d say,
“I wish...

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