I'm moved to explore the prompt: "Homage is not as dangerous as we think." I would not have considered homage dangerous, perhaps dull or sentimental, but not dangerous. So I looked it up. Homage is a public display of respect, or a creative reference to a person who has greatly influenced that artist. Homage can also (and perhaps more typically) be a reference to one literary work within another. The critical response seems to be that one who uses homage is amateur or unoriginal. So how does that relate to family and poetry? Homage is paying respect on the page to a family member who has influenced one's art or artistic journey--and how can a tribute to one's family be unoriginal? Perhaps the danger lies in the form. What is homage and what is tribute? A tribute is praise, historically accompanying a gift. So, homage could be tribute delivered in the artistic form of prose, picture or song.

The danger is unoriginality of form, or potential amateur status of falling back on what others have done, or what we know. And yet, homage can open so much up to the poet from these starting points. Homage inherently involves great emotion--dedication to another's craft or deep love for an individual or a shared life--and where greater place does beautiful poetry arise from, than powerful emotion? I am going to run with that concept into the poem of the week that touched me the most with its quiet beauty and pure telling: Lisa Suhair Majaj's "I Remember My Father's Hands" (Inclined, 185).

This poem is an homage to a father who has passed. Yes, we have read such poems before. Yes, we too have loved those who have passed. So how is this poem new; how is it distinctly hers; and how does it open its arms to also become ours? She chosen one detail, trained the lens of the verse upon it, and through that detail told us the most essential story of her father's life and how it touched her own. She does not waste words, holding each moment to two lines. The nine couplets cup the moments before us, each a set of hands themselves.

In the first couplet we are shown the hands that will pass us through the poem. In the second couplet we see a practice, one way they moved perhaps every day. In the third couplet we see what he eats, this family's home placed between the ripped bread, the olive oil, and the birthright. In the fourth couplet we witness his grief, powerful yet almost hidden. In the fifth couplet we see his beloved craft and are introduced to the relationship with the narrator; we see his devotion to beauty and to delicacy, but also notice the narrator as an outsider in the frame, longing for more than what she is given. In the sixth couplet we finally see a meeting between the narrator and father, it is deeply tender but also bittersweet; he holds her face as a child, just once, but for a long moment. In the seventh couplet they have aged, become beasts, this time more visibly mourning the possible loss of a beloved partner. In the eighth couplet they are more emotive than in all the rest, reaching out dramatically, "for the first time pleading;" but we are not told what they plead for--longer life, another chance to more fully express his love, benevolent passage into the next life? In the ninth and final couplet we have left the father's hands and been passed into the narrator's; these hands will stay with her throughout her own life's couplets, keeping her connected to her father and offering her understanding of him that she may not have been able to see in his own life.

Majaj's carefully-chosen details and references to the hands keep this from being a sentimental piece. Through the decidedly loving homage, there is a note of ambivalence in her relationship to her father. Telling the story of father and daughter, or daughter viewing father, through the hands, specifically, functions two-fold: the hands are elemental parts of life, following only these extremities can tell us a great deal about culture, emotions, work and lifestyle; at the same time, there is something detached about telling from the hands. They are far from the face, from the heart. Hands are able to hold back, to rest quietly, to be folded away. Mystery is maintained by the hands. Majaj's relationship with her father seems to mirror this treatment of the hands. Ever detail is lovingly told, expertly observed, but a distance remains, a solitude that was lifted only upon death. The poem moves beyond homage to exploration of the subtle complexities of familial love. And it ends with a note of hope, connection: the return to the poet's own self. The poem takes us on a journey, then releases us with an image of the future--promising and unknown.