In Noguchi’s first poem, “The Shirt His Father Wore That Day…” he tells a story through extended metaphor about Kenji and his imaginary stunts as a surfer.
It is a stunt
Kenji Takezo finds himself
Performing unexpectedly.
The poem takes us through this stunt blow-by-blow and ends with Kenji’s mother ironing on her hands and knees – doing the domestic work that she does to insure that her husband’s shirts are pressed for work.
His mother on her knees
Tries to iron on the ruined table
Anyway.
I found this image the most powerful in the poem. I’ve seen mothers who do what must be done to do what must be done. They improvise.
The image we get of the father might be seen as negative – someone who cares what others think or someone who goes out of his way to impress the people he sees everyday, but could also be read as simply a snapshot of the father –a man who wears a pressed shirt to work daily. Either way, Noguchi is pointing to the shattered pieces of his idea of family to give us a closer look:
His father needs
A shirt to impress
The same co-workers
He see daily.
I appreciate how the poet brings us back to the surfing image at the end by including the mother in his metaphor. He says, In this posture, his mother’s movements / Remind Kenji of a surfer / Waxing the board she will ride.
Also, I appreciate the images of water and surfing throughout the piece: The rhythm of the Pacific in his feet (1:4), Counterbalancing the instability / Of water (2:5,6), The crest of a wave / Pitch over and enclose him (3:2,3)
Then in stanza four, the metaphor starts to blend with Kenji’s reality. The ironing table floats / the small boy / only for a moment / Too much weight in front, it purls / Nose-first, into thick / Brown shag. This gives us a small window into the home.
Another poet who touched my sense of family was Sapphire. In the poem, In My Father’s House, she takes us deep inside a family and shows us several shards that, by the end of the poem, create a powerful portrait of a journey from childhood to adult status. Immediately we are introduced to the father who “shot to his feet as The Star-Spangled Banner hailed the network’s last gleaming.”
She uses dialogue and details to guide us on this trip and does not attempt to sugar coat the moments for us. I liked the raw language and imagery. The fifth stanza is so overwhelming in both the images and the sadness I felt reading this scene. The verbs she uses really make this scene stick (cat sprang / claws gouging / I snatched / slammed / beat skin, teeth, skull with my fists / tied its legs / yanked its tail). WHOA!!! The quickness of the lines and the fact that you can’t really pause through it can only offer a sliver of what the speaker must have been feeling, yet I left this stanza with a racing heart and shortened breath.
The obvious abuse being discussed in this piece is gut wrenching, but when she mentions the bombing of the MOVE organization (families, that makes this piece a Personal As Political statement. Sapphire does not spend time on this political commentary, but mentions several other moments in black history where those in power abused their power and the results were traumatic (and in two cases, affected children).
All this and it’s only the first movement of the poem.
The other four movements share qualities with the first and all have the common thread of family through them. I loved seeing the intersections across (and through) each movement. Of the 81 poems we read for this section, this is one I will come back to and spend time with on my own because there are so many layers of family to uncover and discover.
peacelovelight
Kiala
