WHAT WAS 

YOUR FATHER LIKE?

Poem for Today - April 11, 2014

AMATEUR FIGHTER

- for my father

What's left is the tiny gold glove
hanging from his left key chain. But,
before that, he had come to boxing,

as a boy, our of necessity - one more reason
to stay away from home, go late
to that cold house and dinner alone

in the dim kitchen.  Perhaps he learned
just to box a stepfather, then turned
that anger into a prize at the Halifax gym.

Later, in New Orleans, there were the books
he couldn't stop reading. A scholar, his eyes
weakening. Fighting, then, a way to live

dangerously. He'd leave his front tooth out
for pictures so that I might understand
living meant suffering, loss. Really living

meant taking risks, so he swallowed
a cockroach in a bar on a dare, dreamt
of being a bullfighter. And at the gym

on Tchoupitoulas Street , he trained
his fists to pound into a bag
the fury contained in his gentle hands.

The red headgear, hiding his face,
could make me think he was someone else,
that my father was somewhere else, not here

holding his body up to pain.

(c)  Natasha Trethewey