Father's Day

I am commissioned to write this poem
To celebrate a day like any other day
Which recognizes nonetheless
It is the day from which all others spring.

Here every ordinary day finds fountain
In the deep seed of its past,
That rises like a face and spurts
Into a speaking form. The father

Was always present, there is no moment
Which negates the act, which makes the deed
Less real, for from it every real became;
But this reflection is an affirmation
And reflects, as if the father were the sun
Glinting from a pool.

Am I the pool? Can I negate
The law which is my nature to reflect,
The difference of this day which I deny
Until it slips and blends in with the past,
An accident of every future hope?

The future is my being, and history
The father's looming face.
What is my father but a wrinkled mass
Of what became, a grey intelligence,
A broken vein? But yet
To speak against the father
Will deny the self that speaks, because
The father is the prospect of the self
That looks ahead into the time
That blends the future with the past, and so
The father is the spring of possibility
Before the self that falls, and so that self
Can realize only in the father, only in your 'You'
The 'I'. The father speaks through me
And hence I see, and if I fight the father
I am blind.

But does the backwards bending
Figure of the father twist,
Infect all being? He makes it in,
The mother is to make, and so the mother
Fights against the father,
From which fertile ground
I grow. And all this growth is just
The affirmation, spreading from the roots
Up to the seed, and then the stem
Which flowers in the 'Yes', the will
That feeds the future on the past,
Whose beauty is the 'You' that crowns the 'I'.

And so this day is not like other days
In that commission, through the affirmation,
Firms the 'I' who speaks then as a friend,
And only through this trust can we find love
Which is the beauty of our being.