Donna Landrum
ENG 1102
Waldrep
February 25, 2007
Response to
“My Father’s Love Letters” by Yusef Komunyakaa is a study in contrasts. The title itself begins the first of the contrasting themes in this poem. Including the words Love Letters in the poem’s title immediately brings a romantic and ornate scene to mind. One would think from the title that this will be a flowery love poem containing elements of love letters from a man to his beloved wife. The first few lines of the poem, however, quickly disillusion the reader on this point.
The scene is set of a simple, hard-working man who comes home from working at the local mill and has a beer after work. Instead of the flowery words we may have expected to hear, a different scene unfolds. Here enters a child. A child asked to write letters to the mother, the father’s obviously estranged wife. The wife, one may assume, has moved to the desert and sends them postcards of desert flowers. Instead of “I Love You” and words extolling her beauty and grace, we hear begging and promises to never beat her again. This is not the love letter one would normally expect. We have quickly migrated from the expected romantic soliloquies to a scene of spousal abuse acerbated by possible alcoholism.
Yet, on the flip side, there is some small happiness here. The child, a son one would presume, as he was left behind with the father when the mother escaped, seems happy that the mother is no longer subjected to the brutality that his father is so apologetic over. While still writing the words that his father wants his wife to hear, the child is tempted to slip in some reminder of his own to his mother, that even the beautiful and romantic words of the love song “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” had not been able to make the swelling go down from one of the beatings the husband had obviously given her previously. This leads us to believe that the child had heard these promises to the accompaniment of romantic music,...