Thursday, February 07, 2013
Today Euan showed me this poem and asked me to go through it with him.
My father began as a god,
full of heroic tales of days when he was young.
His laws were immutable as if brought down from Sinai,
which indeed he thought they were,
He fearlessly lifted me to heaven by a mere swing to his shoulder,
and made of me a godling by seating me astride our milch-cow's back,
and, too, upon the great white gobbler of which others went in constant fear.
Strange then how he shrank and shrank
until by my time of adolescence
he had become a foolish small old man
with silly and outmoded views of life and morality.
Stranger still that as I became older his faults and his intolerance
scaled away into the past revealing virtues such as honesty, generosity and integrity.
Strangest of all how the deeper he recedes into the grave
the more I see myself as just one more of all the little man
who creep through life not knee high to this long dead god.