This week’s poem, Samaa Abdurraqib’s “The Absence Paternal,” is a powerful and tender meditation on loss – but a meditation undertaken in advance of a death, rather than in its aftermath. I’m moved by how beautifully this poem navigates between the universal and the deeply personal, and I love the clarion candor of its question.

Abdurraqib lives in Portland and is excited to be returning to poetry after a 20-year hiatus from expressing herself in this form. She is always anxious about sharing her poetry, but she continues to do so because she believes in the power and beauty of poetry and hopes that her sharing will encourage others to share the powerful and beautiful things they’ve written.

 

The Absence Paternal

By Samaa Abdurraqib

 

One day, I will lose my father.

Just like that, the words actual and precise, because time

Does not hold us close and

Last year was a plague of paternal deaths

One after the

Other, like seconds ticking past.

I do not know how they

All caught their breath,

All of these newly fatherless.

 

How do you mourn the one who taught you the truth and the lie of patriarchy?

 

The way that fathers turn their cheeks to their children who are not boys

The way that puberty dawns with distance

 

How do you mourn the one who taught you that there is a softening?

 

Beard. Thaub. Sandalwood.

Aging skin. Aging eyes. Aging hands.

Softening

 

One day, I will be left without.

Just like that.

Not quite

orphan, still. Without.

 

What will the shape of that absence be?

 

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “The Absence Paternal,” copyright © 2020 by Samaa Abdurraqib, appears by permission of the author.

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