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FURTHER READING
Poems About Fathers
Blood
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Daddy
by Sylvia Plath
Deer Hit
by Jon Loomis
Descriptions of Heaven and Hell
by Mark Jarman
Do not go gentle into that good night
by Dylan Thomas
Father Outside
by Nick Flynn
Father's Song
by Gregory Orr
Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World
by Sherman Alexie
Inventing Father In Las Vegas
by Lynn Emanuel
Man of the Year
by Robin Becker
my father moved through dooms of love
by E. E. Cummings
My Father on His Shield
by Walt McDonald
My Papa's Waltz
by Theodore Roethke
Parents
by William Meredith
Poems about Fathers
The Idea of Ancestry
by Etheridge Knight
Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden
Whose Mouth Do I Speak With
by Suzanne Rancourt
With Kit, Age 7, at the Beach
by William Stafford
Working Late
by Louis Simpson
Yesterday
by W. S. Merwin
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My Father's Hat  
by Mark Irwin

   Sunday mornings I would reach

high into his dark closet while standing
on a chair and tiptoeing reach
higher, touching, sometimes fumbling
the soft crowns and imagine
I was in a forest, wind hymning
through pines, where the musky scent
of rain clinging to damp earth was
his scent I loved, lingering on
bands, leather, and on the inner silk
crowns where I would smell his
hair and almost think I was being
held, or climbing a tree, touching
the yellow fruit, leaves whose scent
was that of a clove in the godsome
air, as now, thinking of his fabulous
sleep, I stand on this canyon floor
and watch light slowly close
on water I'm not sure is there.



From Bright Hunger by Mark Irwin. Copyright ©2004 by Mark Irwin. Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd. All rights reserved.

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