Watching Daddy Struggle to Read

(My parents and older siblings taught me to love books. But Dad was the one who told me that reading could be humbling. It expands your knowledge, but it reveals your smallness. The more you read, the more you realize how little you know.

In the years before he left us, it was so sad to see him holding his grandchildren's books, turning their pages, and unable to read the letters. I wrote a poem after watching one such incident in 2011 or 2012.

Watching Daddy Struggle to Read

You hold a book open on pages 44 to 45

But it is just a weight on your jittery hands

Your decades of alliance with the written word

Have been broken, or worse totally obliterated

Your unsure smile reveals the hidden helplessness

You used to have such a sharp mind:

Your high school classmates would say

A genius with numbers

An English grammar police

Despite the strong accent

Reminiscent of that rustic place

You were born in

Where forthrightness and truth

Are more important than oration

With a foreign accent

I remember everything:

“You say, ‘independent of,’ not ‘from’

‘Result in,’ not ‘to’

‘Comply with’, not ‘to.’” I was nine or ten

But never too young to learn

For someone who believed

So much that familiarity with correctness

Could lead his child to bigger things

Perhaps, a voice for the unheard

A defender of the oppressed

Now, at 75, like a baby taking her first steps

You struggle hard-

I can only imagine how much-

To make sense of the letters

Your hand used to write so beautifully

The words you wrote were always

Shaped like an artist’s masterpiece

Now they are jagged on the edges

Like your memories- fuzzy on the corners

I wonder, Daddy, do you have nostalgia

Of the days when it was not like this?

How I wish the vacuum in your memory

Did not swallow remembered love for us

And our obedience, however failing, to your edict:

"Always be something for others

All the good books teach that."