“I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.”
Virginia Woolf
At Monday's Poetry Circle, our invited poet Brenda
Hillman read from her recent book
"Extra Hidden Life
among the Days". What a revelation............... Can one really write so honestly about
one's father, examining their strengths, weaknesses, values and more? Brenda certainly does in the Elegies section of this insightful and
inspiring book.
As I was listening to her read about her father, I was thinking of my own father, his
hi strengths and weaknesses, his values, the words he used. I have carried some of the words he spoke
deep within me.....the appalling east Texas racist expressions..... and have been so disturbed by them. And ashamed. And confused. How could my
gentle, loving, and affectionate father have used such words?
Clearly, for so long I have been as Virginia says, overwhelmed by what I ought to
have written. Listening to Brenda read about her father freed something
in me about my father.....and I found the proper words. In two days I wrote the poem, My Father Spoke in Aughts.
