October 7: More Daughter, New Poem, Guilt

This afternoon, I'm still experiencing a great deal of guilt over how I treated my daughter last night.  It's ridiculous.  I know she's forgiven me, probably hasn't thought about it all day.  I, being a good, upstanding, bottle-fed Catholic, hang on to guilt with the tenacity of a snapping turtle.  I will get over it, in a few years.

My poem this evening is inspired by this mixture of love and guilt.  It also has a little of the Greek mythology I've been teaching thrown in for good measure.

That's Saint Marty's recipe for this little hymn of father love.

In Praise of Daughters

Zeus gave birth to Athena himself, from a pain in his deathless temples, ten thousand Greeks pounding the walls of Troy.  She charged from his skull, full grown and armored, wailed a war cry louder than the cries of all the mothers who've lost sons in battle.  A sound that shook the dust of Olympus.  Zeus heard her, saw the bronze on her breasts, watched her flight, up and up, and knew his creation was good, the way Elohim knew light and dark, heaven and earth, sea and mud, man and woman were good on day six.

I saw my daughter charge into the world on a morning of wind and ice.  Heard her first sound, a call to battle.  For oxygen and milk.  Her frog body, slick and red, mapped the contours of my heart, its empty ventricles and auricles.  Flooded them.  The way the sea flooded the Titanic that April night.  I foundered, split, capsized, went under.  Swallowed whole by an ocean of daughter.  Now, almost eleven years later, I watch her this autumn day.  She stands in a cyclone of gold and red.  The leaves spin, rise around her, catch her hands and feet and hair, carry her up and up.  To the clouds.  To the moons.  Up and up.  To the constellations.  Up and up.  Cassiopeia.  Andromeda.  Up and up.  Cygnus.  Scutum.  And up.  Virgo.  And up.  To the arms of Zeus.  Of Elohim.  Up.  Where she sings and dances like an owl-eyed goddess.

My little Athena