A Poem for My Father
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- A Poem for My Father*
how sad it must be to love so many women to need so many black perfumed bodies weeping underneath you.
when i remember all those nights i filled my mind with long wars between short sighted trojans & greeks while you slapped some wide hips about in your pvt dungeon, when i remember your deformity i want to do something about your makeshift manhood. i guess
that is why on meeting your sixth wife, i cross myself with her confessionals. [End Page 1068]
Sonia Sanchez has been described as “Poet. Mother. Professor. National and International lecturer on Black Culture and Literature, Women’s Liberation, Peace and Racial Justice. Sponsor of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Board Member of MADRE.” She is author of more than sixteen books, among them I’ve Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems, A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women, Homegirls and Handgrenades (winner of The Langston Hughes Poetry Award and the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities), Wounded in the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have Lions? (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), A Sound Investment and Other Stories, and Shake Loose My Skin. She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University, where she held the Laura Carnell Chair in English. For her work she has been given many honors and awards, including the Harper Lee Award, The Alabama Distinguished Writer, the Leeway Foundation Transformational Award, the National Visionary Leadership Award, and the Robert Creeley Award.
Footnotes
* Originally published in I’ve Been a Woman (Chicago: Third World Press, 1985).
