Absent Father by Ebony Stewart Lyrics
Absent Father
When’s the last time you heard a poem about an absent father, and if you can recall the answer to that question easily, well...THAT’s the problem. That’s why many of us ran into the warm arms of poetry. Why many of us found life within the boundaries of a page of a space of a blank array to create the man we wanted to know. Our storytelling started while we were old, but young in flesh, young at heart, curious about why we were left. They could’ve been Superman’s or presidents, artists, or veterans, anything to distract us from what the ugly truth could be that maybe..he just didn’t want me.
SO we wrote...and we wrote..until lies became truths and planks of woods became boats became the tool that kept us afloat to survive within this beautiful lie. To protect us from storms that our mother hated to hide pulling back the wool over my eyes trying to show us that this is simply life. And this is not how you are defined instead we took that advice and made something from nothing. Because a child with no father is nothing but a refugee searching for a place to call home and the moment that your absent is the moment where you have no place to belong we have no place to belong we are walking halves with missing cultures we are thirsty vultures trying to finish the other side without peaking before it’s finished the whole. By the time we grow into adults we look like picasso’s. Two faces with different perspectives. The face forward . Confident and detective of identity. The other looking to the side trying to figure out why me? The color choice especially, because we have been made up of colored oil that hasn’t reached its full term, turmoil that churns and churns until greys palette that breeds. Because although we are full of so much vibrancy it's really the grey that matters underneath because that grey resembles uncertainty and that goes back to HE to him. To the man we call father . to the one responsible for bringing us into this place and his responsibility is something he chose to erase which is why we ERASE lines and rhymes that don’t fit. We are fathers, we are using their gift to create something beautiful, share it with the world, and then exit
When’s the last time you heard a poem about an absent father, and if you can recall the answer to that question easily, well...THAT’s the problem. That’s why many of us ran into the warm arms of poetry. Why many of us found life within the boundaries of a page of a space of a blank array to create the man we wanted to know. Our storytelling started while we were old, but young in flesh, young at heart, curious about why we were left. They could’ve been Superman’s or presidents, artists, or veterans, anything to distract us from what the ugly truth could be that maybe..he just didn’t want me.
SO we wrote...and we wrote..until lies became truths and planks of woods became boats became the tool that kept us afloat to survive within this beautiful lie. To protect us from storms that our mother hated to hide pulling back the wool over my eyes trying to show us that this is simply life. And this is not how you are defined instead we took that advice and made something from nothing. Because a child with no father is nothing but a refugee searching for a place to call home and the moment that your absent is the moment where you have no place to belong we have no place to belong we are walking halves with missing cultures we are thirsty vultures trying to finish the other side without peaking before it’s finished the whole. By the time we grow into adults we look like picasso’s. Two faces with different perspectives. The face forward . Confident and detective of identity. The other looking to the side trying to figure out why me? The color choice especially, because we have been made up of colored oil that hasn’t reached its full term, turmoil that churns and churns until greys palette that breeds. Because although we are full of so much vibrancy it's really the grey that matters underneath because that grey resembles uncertainty and that goes back to HE to him. To the man we call father . to the one responsible for bringing us into this place and his responsibility is something he chose to erase which is why we ERASE lines and rhymes that don’t fit. We are fathers, we are using their gift to create something beautiful, share it with the world, and then exit