☀ Today's Poem: Excerpt from "signs, music" Raymond Antrobus

February 4, 2025

The new father

didn’t want to be called father
so he raised the bridge to protect the borders

of fatherhood. He shouted over the water.
The harshness of his voice was hereditary.

Why is he a monument when he could be
a yoga stretch, an open hand, a name

over another name?
There can be no dispensation

for the father. He’s gone through life pretending
it was the house shivering and not his father.

His father never said he wanted
to be his father and here he is, wanting

to be his father. He wants to be warm
as midnight cups and running

car engines and the man
in Freetown who rowed him across the river

and asked him to name the countries
he’d been to, before he told him

he’d never been anywhere
but motherland, fatherland. Amen.

•

I hold my son in a fluorescent corridor, a floaty
fatherland, a new field of focus.

•

Fatherland! he said,
when he meant a lake
of delirium.

•

from the book SIGNS, MUSIC / Tin House

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This poem appears in Raymond Antrobus' poetry collection, "Signs, Music," about fatherhood and masculinity, published in 2024 by Picador in the UK and Tin House in the US, and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Raymond Antrobus on "signs, music"

"Detroit Poet Steps Out In Her Good Dress"

"I think a lot about adornment. I think a lot about land, about gentrification. There are a few poems in the book that are thinking about places that my family used to live that don’t exist anymore. Lycaste and Vernor is where my family’s neighborhood was and now there’s a Chrysler (Stellantis) plant there. So, very much thinking about the history of the land and what things are removed and then what things stay in and how we maintain those stories of the things that are removed. "

viaBRIDGE DETROIT

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Cover image of Carol Moldaw's new book, Go Figure

What Sparks Poetry: Carol Moldaw on Drafts

"In many ways, this draft marks the end of my blind groping and the beginning of the poem proper. Nothing I’d written up to that point had caught my poetic interest linguistically; my thoughts, preoccupations, and perceptions had been floating around without substance or anchor. In this draft though, images began to coalesce, and the lines develop a distinctive voice—the poem’s voice."

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