[Maryann Corbett]

As tomorrow is Father's Day, this seems like a good time to explore poems about fathers. I'm realizing how many great ones spring to mind, and how many are absolutely canonical. There are the exalted ones, like Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," and the regretful ones, like Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," and the lovingly warts-and-all ones, like Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz."

A fine new one is R.S. Gwynn's "Dogwatch," but I recall an older Gwynn poem that I'm still hunting for, and I hope to be back with it.

I hope others have poems to add, ideally poems that will be new to some of us.

And although this isn't the poem I had in mind to search for, this Gwynn poem also fits the occasion:

A Box of Ashes

D.E.G., 1917-1995

A box of ashes, which we scattered on
Your parents’ gravesite where the soil was poor,
Cycles through root and crystal to restore
The cracked red clay that shrank around their stone.
New growth is whispering what you might have known,
Stemming the nothingness you asked us for:
A box of ashes.

If grit and granule, chalky bits of bone,
And your life’s dusty shards weigh little more
Than handfuls sifted in a garden store,
Ponder, Father, why these green blades have grown:
A box of ashes.