To A Sad Father

As I step out into the world 

I’m surrounded by the flowers of life:

forsythia, carnations, daisies, and hyacinth; 

their petals litter the path I walk on.

I marvel in their beauty. 

Striking colours coat each petal, telling stories of love, regret, anger…

You see me as flourishing forsythia; 

absorbing each glimmer of warm sunlight.

And you see yourself as a cloud, as a drought, as barren soil that prevents me from blossoming.

You’re afraid of cutting my stems and picking my petals, 

but you are not my destroyer, you are my sun.

You give me everything I need to grow and flower:

However, I am not forsythia. 

I am an Iceberg Rose as white as snow.

I’ve not been coloured with the paints of experience and emotions. 

But I’m ready to step out into the world and undergo the frantic search

that will paint my petals the colours of Forsythia, Carnations, Daisies, and Hyacinth. 

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Michael Ondaatje’s poem: “To A Sad Daughter,” is a beautiful free verse piece. Written as a letter, it provides the audience- his daughter- with meaningful advice that will guide her in life. Ondaatje’s use of colours and flowers inspired me to create the poem above. I decided to use flowers to symbolize different emotions an individual feels throughout their life and write my poem from the daughter’s point of view. 

In the first stanza, I name the flowers of life which were chosen specifically because of their meaning.

Forsythia: symbolize happiness and caution. 

Carnations: symbolize love and affection.

Daisies: symbolize purity and innocence.

Hyacinth: symbolize sorrow and regret.

I decided to use Forsythia in my poem so I could create a sort of parallelism between my work and Ondaatje’s. I also decided to incorporate it to symbolize all the happiness and fear the daughter will face in life. I chose to include Carnations to symbolize the inviolable love the father and daughter share which is reflected strongly in Ondaatje’s poem. He gives her important advice such as following her hopes and ambitions and not being afraid to make mistakes. But he also begins to slowly let her go so she can venture out into the world and find her path in life. The daughter’s naivety and innocence from Ondaatje’s poem inspired me to incorporate such an idea into my work, so I chose Daisies to be another prominent flower. Hyacinth, the last in the “flowers of life” represent the despair and sadness that the daughter will have to face because of death or loss. Ondaatje mentions how the daughter is afraid of death in his poem and since death is an inevitable aspect of life I decided to incorporate it into my poem as well. 

In the second stanza, the daughter explains how her father sees her as a beautiful flower blossoming under the sun, but sees himself as a cloud that covers the sun; preventing her from growing. The father believes he is being greedy and selfish when he hangs on to his daughter because he is afraid to let go. However, the daughter reassures him and explains that he isn’t holding her down, but allowing her to grow and learn even more. 

In the last stanza, the daughter explains how she perceives herself. She disagrees with her father’s opinion and believes she’s Iceberg Rose not Forsythia. The daughter sees herself as a white flower that’s ready to be coloured with all of the emotions and experiences she will receive from life. She is ready to experience every flower of life and is able to do so successfully with her father’s guidance and advice. 

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Response to “Nanima” by Alysha Mohamed

Mother Tongue

Sweet words glide off my parents tongue as they reminisce about their childhood.

I listen in awe, imagining living a life so different from my own.

 Broken Punjabi litters my tongue as I scramble to find the right words to express my thoughts.

Eventually giving up and resorting to the language I’m surrounded by. 

“It’s harder to speak Punjabi because I’m not constantly surrounded by it.” I tell myself. 

But the real reason:

I have chosen to bury my mother tongue.

An Ignorant decision that still haunts me 

and taunts me every time I struggle to find the words of the language I have chosen to ignore.

Regret stifles my words, as I speak in a dialect that is not my own.

But there is still hope, as I look around and see a world filled with my native tongue and the culture it represents.

And suddenly I am determined to dig up every last piece of Punjabi I have suppressed.

Until the words are able to glide off my tongue effortlessly 

and tell stories I have yet to encounter. 

I was inspired by the lines: “I wish my language wasn’t buried//before I knew how to speak.” in Alysha Mohamed’s poem “Nanima.” Through these lines Mohamed encapsulated the feeling of losing a part of her identity and how she wishes her culture and language weren’t dead before she was born. Although my language wasn’t buried before I was born, in some shape or form, I have chosen to bury it. Every time I choose to speak English instead of Punjabi I am losing a part of my identity. The repercussions of my actions has caused me to forget my mother tongue which has further resulted in a struggle to communicate with elders, my family, and relatives. I wrote this poem to portray the feeling of living between two languages and the feeling an individual gets when their native language begins slipping away. 

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Bibliography

https://unsplash.com/photos/EwawqhV2Doc

https://unsplash.com/photos/H8n3KZ1griA

https://unsplash.com/photos/cocyYtuj93M

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