Red Letter Poem #254
Unatoned
I’m fifteen years old, and halfway through our delicious
Dinner when my father, for once, gets home
From his store by six and sits down to eat with us.
My younger brother goes right on carving his lamb.
I lift my fork—then put it back down. I gulp
Some water. I try some bread. And then I get up
All too abruptly from the kitchen table,
And carry my half-filled plate to the garbage pail.
Fifty years pass, and no getting past the way
My mother looked at me. I couldn’t stomach
The stench that clung to his clothes from standing all day
At his butcher’s block. And now and forever I choke
On the meat from that meal: as if I’d sinned against
My father’s mortal flesh, my place at the feast.
––George Kalogeris
What is more shame-producing, more self-lacerating than memories of our youthful self-righteousness––and recognition of the hurt our blindness engendered? We knew; we possessed certainty––and thus any brash gesture or gratuitous attack on our part felt wholly justified. And isn’t this especially painful when we recall the relationship with our parents and the wounds we remember inflicting? Yet I can confidently repeat our and we in these sentences because such violation of our filial duty must be something of a universal experience. Examples in literature abound––even prior to that Biblical injunction to “honor thy father and mother”––and still the pattern persists across millennia. So, in today’s Letter, we have a further example from George Kalogeris––who, I must quickly say, is not only a superb poet (if you haven’t read his Winthropos, from Louisiana State University Press, I suggest you rush to your nearest bookstore,) but one of the gentlest and most thoughtful individuals I know. Still, at age fifteen, he could coldly commit an act that remains in his mind as a devastating sin: he attempted to shame his father for daring to come home from his butcher shop with the stink of the world on his clothing. And then, to twist the metaphorical knife, he dumped into the garbage the very food this hardworking immigrant had labored so earnestly to provide.
There are many devastating details included in this poem: how the younger brother, in his innocence, goes on eating, unaware of what is taking place. And how the platefuls of this “delicious/ Dinner” are heaped with lamb––a typical feature of Greek cuisine, certainly, but an unmistakable stand-in for their religious savior, the ‘Lamb of God.’ That the father most often comes home too late to dine with the family seems to be regarded, by the speaker, as a failing––ignoring the very reason why a man might be prompted to work such long hours. But the most wonderful/awful image, to my mind, must be the way a simple admonitioning look from his mother underscores the boy’s shame, returns pain for pain, which persists even decades later. Belatedly, we all must learn that it’s the family gathering which constitutes “the feast”––no matter how luxurious or simple the meal; childish diffidence only results in a kind of self-banishment.
Reading “Unatoned,” I couldn’t help imagining myself at aged eight, playing in our backyard, blissfully unaware, while––“protected” by my mother from the dark knowledge of what was about to engulf our family––my father lay in our living room in a rented hospital bed at death’s doorway. What I wouldn’t give to have been older, wiser, so I might have offered some comfort to this dying man. What the poet here wouldn’t offer in exchange for a seat at that kitchen table, to savor again the fruits of his father’s arduous work. And we both must share the company of a poet like Robert Hayden who, as a boy, only seemed to notice his father’s “chronic angers”––and not the fact that he arose early on Sunday mornings to drive the winter cold from the house, and to polish his son’s “good shoes” for church. When Hayden closes his poem with these plangent lines: “What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?” our hearts seize––and we, too, must remember. So what are all we ‘sinners’ to do about these shameful memories? I look back at the ancient Greek word ἱλασμός (hilasmos) which is often translated as “propitiation” or an “atoning sacrifice.” Even years later, it is still possible to make amends. I hope I’ll be forgiven if I borrow from the Hellenistic tradition and recommend an offering to the gods. Perhaps Apollo’s temple would be a good place to start because he was not the Father of the Olympian deities, but rather Zeus’ son––and I imagine he harbors his own memories of youthful disobedience. In addition, Apollo was not only the patron of poets and musicians but farmers and shepherds as well––so he has a deep understanding of how hard it is to nurture new life in a harsh universe. And what would be a fitting sacrifice? George, it seems, is willingly providing the ‘burnt offering’ of his transgressive heart. But I’d recommend this instead: a poem or a song which might delight Apollo. How about a sly sonnet like “Unatoned” whose colloquial rhythms and subtle off-rhymes barely rise above dinner table diction? Perhaps this might earn us the knowledge that our fathers and mothers have, most likely, already forgiven us the pains we delivered––because they, too, were young once and had to learn about “love’s austere and lonely offices” to expiate their own sad memories.
The Red Letters
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