¶ … Father's Love Letters
Poetry is unique in literary art in that it can portray any emotion and any tone. Even in a limited space, more emotion and meaning can be conveyed in a few poetic lines than some authors can convey in hundreds of pages. Yusef Komunyakaa's sad and depressing poem "My Father's Love Letters" is a prime example of the potential emotional strength that can be shown in a few lines. In Komunyakaa's fairly short piece, the young narrator of the poem explains to the reader about how his or her father tries to write a weekly series of love letters to a woman who has gone away, the child's mother. This particular poem is a type of narrative which functions to tell a story as well as to perform within the framework of a traditional poem, although it does not have either a uniform meter or any rhyming pattern to speak of. The poet uses tone and imagery in order to tell the story of his father's failed romance and his inability to change into a decent man.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Komunyakaa's poem is the tone of voice which the first-person narrator takes in the piece. He or she is evidently a child or at the very least a teen as they still live at home with the father. The child seems to be happy with the life that they currently live. From the text it seems that there is only the child and the father in the house and this is a living arrangement which is perfectly suited to the child, or at least he or she claims to be happy this way. The child is trying to inform...
He or she begins by explaining how their father comes home each Friday night and they two would perform a routine. The father would open a can of Jax, which is a kind of
beer. Following this, the two remaining members of the family would sit together and the father would have the child write a letter which would be sent to the child's mother who does not live with the family anymore for obvious reasons.
This is a story of
abuse and familial discord. At the heart is an unhappy child and his miserable parents who have jointly created a household where normal development is impossible. From the text, it is evident that the relationship between mother and father ended because of
violence on the part of the male
parent. The narrator makes it clear that the mother left because the father was abusive and that he wishes to get her back and that is why they have this weekly custom. "He would beg. / Promising to never beat her / Again" (lines 5-7). Not…
