On Poetry: Parents love, wrinkle, die

June 13, 2009 08:05 pm

—

My father is 91 this year.

He still lives on his own in Missouri, has a lady friend in an assisted living complex, attends local discussion forums and drives three days a week for Meals on Wheels -- an amazing man who has been both my joy and my distress, as parents sometimes are to their children.

Which is why this poem by William Meredith appeals to me.

Meredith gets exactly to the heart of the parent/child ambiguities.

He enters the mind of a child, the way we see our parents as impossibly different from us, then what it's like to see them aging, and how we feel, caught in our own baffling life, while the only ones we depended upon to explain it to us die without being able to explain it to us.

And then we're them, and our children and grandchildren are equally as uncomprehending as we were.

Sounds depressing, but the heart of the poem is in these two lines: "It is grotesque how they go on/ loving us, we go on loving them."

Grotesque, in the sense that there's so much against it, so much pain, annoyance, sometimes real suffering, in the parent-child relationship, yet we go on loving each other.

You need to read the title as part of the poem.

The poem is a definition of parents.

Parents

What it must be like to be an angel
or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner.

The last time we go to bed good,
they are there, lying about darkness.

They dandle us once too often,
these friends who become our enemies.

Suddenly one day, their juniors
are as old as we yearn to be.

They get wrinkles where it is better
smooth, odd coughs, and smells.

It is grotesque how they go on
loving us, we go on loving them

The effrontery, barely imaginable,
of having caused us. And of how.

Their lives: surely
we can do better than that.

This goes on for a long time. Everything
they do is wrong, and the worst thing,

they all do it, is to die,
taking with them the last explanation,

how we came out of the wet sea
or wherever they got us from,

taking the last link
of that chain with them.

Father, mother, we cry, wrinkling,
to our uncomprehending children and grandchildren.

-- William Meredith

Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware.

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