You Have No Idea Poem by Seamus O' Brian

You have no idea- how could you?
Anger edging the sharpness of your words
Rising like a wind-driven tide to thrust you
and your knives against the seawall that once
was your father. Arrogant anger unrestrained
by unlived years, by unwalked roads, by uncarried
burdens.

You have no idea that fingers pointing, red face
raging, I still see a little boy who stood once upon
my knee to reach the fountain with lips poised, pursed.
You fling your arms upward, brandishing the swordplay
of your frustration as if heaven rent would endorse your claim.
Your eyes probe this wall, expecting a crack
that will reveal the triumph of your irrefutable logic,
blink away the fury that must follow my silence.

But you have no idea.

You have no idea that in my silence I do not see
the tear that now exists as only a trace across your cheek.
But I see a line of tears tracing back across the years
that I have tasted with my kisses. Countless tears rubbed
away with my fingers, buried in my shirt, lost in my shoulders.
And how I would erase each one
upon my knees if I could, and if I thought it would
make you- what? Better? Stronger?
Sometimes being a father is pantomime in the dark.

I know that many the night you lie awake
and the pain in your chest keeps asking you
how unfairness and stubbornness can pretend
to be love.
How antiquated blindness
could in self-deception assume
to be justice.
I hope that you have some idea
that for every night such pain
is your lullaby, I have spent
a hundred nights begging God
to teach me how to be your father.

I hope that you have some idea
That I know well the pain you feel.
That I have carried that same pain
within my chest, and that if I could-
I would carry yours too.
That I wish you would never hunger desperately
to be understood, that you would never
know the knifing ache of loving one
to whom your love is nothing.
That you will never stand on the threshold
of your world destroyed
and have no idea which way to turn.

But if and when you must stand
in the destruction of what you thought
your life was;
If you find yourself lost without the strength
to find your way home,
When you have done all you can in your own
strength, and it is not enough
Then I hope you know; then you MUST know
That you are not alone.

You stand upon, you are surrounded by
The prayers of a thousand restless nights.
Prayers whispered over your sleeping head
Resting soundlessly upon my chest.
Prayers that baptized your forehead with my tears
As I struggled with those things that are not yet.
Prayers breathed into the darkness
of your bedroom in those hours
when fathers walk the night.

Prayers prayed
while you had no idea.