A Boy and his Father - by Esther Omemu

I am not the strongest authority on the topic of masculinity simply because it is not my lived experience. But my twocents still matters—because those who have lived it often won’t talk about it.As a poet, I find myself drawn to the things that do not concern me. Maybe it’s because curiosity is the currency of depth. Maybe it’s because the unspoken things are the ones that weigh the most. And among the many subjects that have left me both baffled and burdened, one remains persistently elusive: the relationship between a father and his son.It is an ancient story, told in the gaps between words, in the firm handshakes, in the silence stretched across decades. It is a tale of inheritance—of names, expectations, and sometimes, wounds. It is a story that is not always tender, not always violent, but often distant.The Questions We Ask, The Answers We Never GetI have tried to understand this relationship through poetry, shaping my thoughts into the stories of men who have loved in silence and lost in denial. The poems I have written or encountered do not offer answers; they only magnify the questions.In I Wonder How Deep I Could Go, a son seeks love in the bottom of a bottle, mirroring a father who drowns in it. He asks a man who looks like him—his father—what it means to be loved by him, but the only answer he receives is in the weight of an arm that does not offer comfort, in the snicker that swallows truth. The poem asks: What happens when a father is the first man who teaches a son about absence? In There Is the Voice of a Child in His Mouth, we meet a man who does not recognize his own grief, who carries a child’s voice in his throat but cannot name the sorrow. The poem suggests that masculinity, inherited as it often is, comes with a haunting—a boy inside every man, crying out in the places no one listens.  How many fathers were once boys who were never allowed to cry? <blockquote>he does not know why, when he sits in the dark counting the grey in his locs, his insides quiver— and a boy he does not remember sings dirges in his stomach.</blockquote>And then there is I Heard of a Man Who Wore Secrets, a generational story of men who have planted stones where flowers were meant to grow. A boy finds himself standing before a father who is all clenched teeth and buried truths, and he learns that what is passed down is not just wisdom or wealth, but silence. A box filled with instructions on how to carry everything—everything but themselves. What do sons inherit when their fathers have nothing but pain to give?The fathers in these poems are not evil men. They are simply men who were given a script they did not know how to rewrite. They were raised in homes where tenderness was a luxury, where vulnerability was a liability. They learned that to survive, one must harden, one must carry, one must endure. And so, they passed these lessons down, not with words, but with actions—or the lack thereof.A father may not say I love you, but he may work himself to exhaustion to provide. He may not hug his son, but he may teach him how to fix a leaky pipe, as if repairing things is the same as offering care. He may not cry in front of his child, but his silence at the dinner table is a kind of mourning, his body weighed down by generations of unspoken grief. But what if these sons don’t want to inherit silence? What if they want to be men who speak, who embrace, who unlearn? What if they do not wish to pass down a map to nowhere, but instead, want to carve a new path—one paved with honesty, with softness, with the freedom to be whole?I do not have the answers to these questions. I do not know what it means to stand in the shoes of these men. But I know that somewhere, a father aches to say the things he never learned how to, and somewhere, a son is waiting for words that will never come. So, to those who have lived this story, who carry the weight of a father’s silence or the confusion of a son’s longing—I ask you to share. What does it mean to be a father? What does it mean to be a son? What does love look like between men who were never taught how to show it?

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