A Must-Read Poem

Part 2 of an occasional series: "Dad Poem (Ultrasound #2)” by Joshua Bennet

Today's Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets struck a chord with me.

Dad Poem (Ultrasound #2)

By Joshua Bennett

with a line from Gwendolyn Brooks

Months into the plague now, I am disallowed entry even into the waiting room with Mom, escorted outside instead by men armed with guns & bottles of hand sanitizer, their entire countenance its own American metaphor. So the first time I see you in full force, I am pacing maniacally up & down the block outside, Facetiming the radiologist & your mother too, her arm angled like a cellist’s to help me see. We are dazzled by the sight of each bone in your feet, the pulsing black archipelago of your heart, your fists in front of your face like mine when I was only just born, ten times as big as you are now. Your great-grandmother calls me Tyson the moment she sees this pose. Prefigures a boy built for conflict, her barbarous and metal little man. She leaves the world only months after we learn you are entering into it. And her mind the year before that. In the dementia’s final days, she envisions herself as a girl of seventeen, running through fields of strawberries, unfettered as a king -fisher. I watch your stance and imagine her laughter echoing back across the ages, you, her youngest descendant born into freedom, our littlest burden-lifter, world -beater, avant-garde percussionist swinging darkness into song.

Here's a link to today's Poem-a-Day email or you can see it on their website here. You can also listen to an audio recording of the poet reading the poem and his explanation of what inspired it.

“Over the past few months, any number of unforgettable moments have been marked, marred, by the various forms of technology meant to make up the distance between us. I attended my grandmother’s funeral via Zoom; I experienced my son’s first ultrasound through a print-out my wife handed me in the car. The second time around, we managed to get adequate phone reception, and talked to each other through the entire procedure. This poem lives in the space between a kind of inexpressible anxiety at the outset of things, and the world-shifting joy of seeing my son’s heartbeat for the first time. In that moment, even at so great a distance, there was an irreducible proximity between us. It wasn’t so much as if I was there, but rather that we were elsewhere together, vibrant, and alive.”

– Joshua Bennett

Take a look my previous "A Must-Read Poem" post here.

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