My father grew up in poverty, an orphan working on a farm in Poland. When he was 20, he was taken to a concentration camp in Germany. He didn't have much education at all, could barely read and write. But he had faith. This is a poem about what he believed.
What My Father Believed
He didn’t know about the Rock of
Ages
or bringing in the sheaves or
Jacob’s ladder
or gathering at the beautiful river
that flows beneath the throne of
God.
He’d never heard of the Baltimore
Catechism
either, and didn’t know the purpose
of life
was to love and honor and serve
God.
He‘d been to the village church as
a boy
in Poland , and knew he was Catholic
because his mother and father were
buried
in a cemetery under wooden crosses.
His sister Catherine was buried
there too.
The day their mother died Catherine
took
to the kitchen corner where the
stove sat,
and cried. She wouldn’t eat or drink, just cried
until she died there, died of a
broken heart.
She was three or four years old, he
was five.
What he knew about the nature of
God
and religion came from the sermons
the priests told at mass, and this
got mixed up
with his own life. He knew living was hard,
and that even children are meant to
suffer.
Sometimes, when he was drinking
he’d ask,
“Didn’t God send his own son here
to suffer?”
My father believed we are here to
lift logs
that can’t be lifted, to hammer
steel nails
so bent they crack when we hit
them.
In the slave labor camps in Germany ,
He’d seen men try the impossible
and fail.
He believed life is hard, and we
should
help each other. If you see someone
on a cross, his weight pulling him
down
and breaking his muscles, you
should try
to lift him, even if only for a
minute,
even though you know lifting won’t
save him.
______________________
Garrison Keillor reads my poem at his Writers Almanack. Click here: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2007/12/28