A Summer Father

sketch by Evelyn Ethel Houghton

A SUMMER FATHER – poetry

When my father, Major John Jarmain, died in the Battle of Normandy on June 26, 1944, I was six years old. A book of his poetry was published in 1945 and I read the poems again and again over the years in an attempt to know the man behind the words. More than six decades later, my own poems reflect a portrait of my absent father and my war-marred childhood. A Summer Father moves from the child’s longing for a father, to the adult’s revulsion from war, to knowledge and, finally, acceptance of death and grief.

VIOLENT POETRY

war was the longest poem
I ever lived:
words blew apart
in my mind
the letters settling
in torn ditches
flying through
broken windows
to rest
on tilted beds
or sliding down
un-walled floors
the epic writes itself
on barrage balloons
that fly across
night skies

war cemeteries
are stanzas carved
over red roses
while silent hands
point guns, bayonets
and I am pinioned
to a falling bomb
written into a ballad
that will explode
in another child

a poem from A Summer Father

© Joanna M. Weston          Frontenac House   $15.95

ISBN: 1-897181-05-1                                Buy This Book