Another Poem and Poet to Consider

God bless google. I read many poems as a young man. I loved to read, and surprisingly I loved to read a good poem. But like the people in my life, I am not too good with names. I read things, get into discussions about them and am at a loss when one asks me who the author is. And now, as an older man, a man in such awe of those who write so well, for those who capture life in words so well, I am embarrassed that I typically do not know the author.

But google has changed that for me. Now I remember just tiny pieces of what I read many years ago, type the phrase into google and I get the author, complete works, and I even get things they wrote that I neglected to read at my younger age.

As a young man my reading was undisciplined, haphazard in both what I randomly got my hands on, or what some wonderful English teacher put into my hands; thank you Miss Pesnell (of Memphis), Mr. McCamey (misspelled I am sure of Seattle) and Mr. McFarlane (of Seattle; and who in order to suck up to my wife Peggy not too long ago pretended that SHE was his favorite student and not me).

But I have now discovered that Carl Sandburg wrote many of my favorite poems, and here is a good one.

Thank you Carl Sandburg!

A Father To His Son

A father sees his son nearing manhood.
What shall he tell that son?'

Life is hard; be steel; be a rock.'
And this might stand him for the storms
and serve him for humdrum monotony
and guide him among sudden betrayals
and tighten him for slack moments.

'Life is a soft loam; be gentle; go easy.'
And this too might serve him.
Brutes have been gentled where lashes failed.
The growth of a frail flower in a path up
has sometimes shattered and split a rock.

A tough will counts. So does desire.
So does a rich soft wanting.
Without rich wanting nothing arrives.
Tell him too much money has killed men
and left them dead years before burial:
the quest of lucre beyond a few easy needs
has twisted good enough men
sometimes into dry thwarted worms.

Tell him time as a stuff can be wasted.
Tell him to be a fool every so often
and to have no shame over having been a fool
yet learning something out of every folly
hoping to repeat none of the cheap follies
thus arriving at intimate understanding
of a world numbering many fools.

Tell him to be alone often and get at himself
and above all tell himself no lies about himself
whatever the white lies and protective fronts
he may use against other people.

Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong
and the final decisions are made in silent rooms.
Tell him to be different from other people
if it comes natural and easy being different.

Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives.
Let him seek deep for where he is born natural.
Then he may understand Shakespeare
and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov,
Michael Faraday and free imaginations
Bringing changes into a world resenting change.

He will be lonely enough
to have time for the work
he knows as his own.