The poet Lyn Lifshin, who divides her time between New York and Virginia, is one of the most prolific poets among my contemporaries, and has thousands of poems in print, by my loose reckoning. I have been reading her work in literary magazines for at least thirty years. Here’s a good example of this poet at her best.

The Other Fathers

would be coming back

from some war, sending

back stuffed birds or

handkerchiefs in navy

blue with Love painted

on it. Some sent telegrams

for birthdays, the pastel

letters like jewels. The

magazines were full of fathers who

were doing what had

to be done, were serving,

were brave. Someone

yelped there’d be confetti

in the streets, maybe

no school. That soon

we’d have bananas. My

father sat in the grey

chair, war after war,

hardly said a word. I

wished he had gone

away with the others

so maybe he would

be coming back to us

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Lyn Lifshin, whose most recent book of poems is Persephone, Red Hen Press, 2008. Poem reprinted from Natural Bridge, No. 20, Winter, 2008, by permission of Lyn Lifshin and the publisher.