My Daughter's Voice: A Father's Day Poem

Just wrote this this Father's Day morning. Today fathers and dads like myself are being lifted up and shown adoration; and yet I somehow suspect that for us fathers this day has little to do with ourselves, and everything to do family (especially our children). I’m sure this is a given, and may even sound cliché … but it had to be said.

This poem I dedicate to my daughter, Chelle (aka Chelles-Bells)



My Daughter's Voice

What hund’red times I must have heard
Her look to me and say the word
That erstwhile I would daily count,
And boast to all the day’s amount.
Ah, myriad a day I hear
That word that still provokes a tear-
Amazed how what my daughter voic’d
Could easy many burdens hoist.

But lo, the word is just a sound
That moves like wind above the ground,
That tinkers with my inner ear
So ‘daddy’ is that thing I hear.
Yet when I hear it I rejoice,
Because it’s this: my daughter’s voice.
This sound, this wind that in me whirl
Reminds me she’s my little girl …

-jwm

Ocean Sky

THE VAULTED blue above the girl,
Who hand in hand with father went,
Produced in her a happy twirl-
A dancing she knew not what meant.

This blue expanse she did adore,
Whose happy clouds did haply sore
To-ward higher place, and even more-
The Heaven where the cherubs tour.

She marveled at that ocean sky-
The blue her father did not see.
It begged in her the question why
It only caused in her a glee.

But then her father saw a bird,
And seen the sky beyond its view.
He nudged his girl with loving word:
That blue sky there to me is you.

-jwm


Of the Poem:

This poem is inspired by and dedicated to Chelle, my little girl and my favorite person in the whole wide world ...