My Father's Voice

My Father’s Voice

Sometimes it’s my father’s voice I hear

in my own, and the dream I dream

may have been his before I was born.

His father I never knew and so on

back through all the years that have ever

been.  The hand I raise to pull the bow

is my left hand.  My mother taught me that,

although some teacher made her change the pen

to her right hand once she went to school.

Now that I’ve lived half my life without them,

some mornings I wake and see the photo

on the wall of their last forty years together.

My father looks straight at me, my mother aside,

because, she said, she’d cry because of pride.

                              —Donnell Hunter

                                        27 March 2012