Father's Day 2020 Poem by Gayathri Seetharam

Father's Day 2020
-Gayathri B. Seetharam
I wished my husband a Happy Father's Day for my son and I
And wrote out in my pretty notepaper,
Do your thing and in the "thingness"
Is the very thing;

My father was a dear soul
Who buried his head deep in his work
Which kept him away from us
And as a fitting but unfair end to his productive personality as a chief engineer and a loving husband and father,
He died on his worksite for he was run over by a truck
And I, the youngest of three children, was in the 6th grade;

My mother mourned him for a few years
And was never unfaithful to his memory
And the fact that she threw herself heart and soul
Into my sister's marriage plans and had her packed off to
A new household when my sister was in her first year undergraduate degree,
Totally taboo to Canada's feminist ways,
Is testimony to my mother's capable ways;

In literature, fathers play a prominent role
And there are some good and bad fathers
King Lear was William Shakespeare's creation
And he is taught a harsh lesson for being really mean to his youngest daughter, Cordelia;

There is Gerald O'Hara, Katie Scarlett's father
Who teaches her to love her home, Tara,
For as he puts it, she has the love of the Irish for their land
But fate plays a cruel role in Gerald's life for by the end of the Civil War,
He, supporting the confederate flag, loses the faculty of his senses,
And is lost in the days of the glorious South
Of course, just yesterday on CBC Radio, my husband and I heard that
Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, has been officially declared as a racist book,
An argument, my son had made in his high school days,
Let it be noted that I loved the book and movie and have read it more than once;

There is Mr. Bennett, the father in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice,
With whom the heroine, Elizabeth Bennett is very close,
More so than her other four sisters
For she shares his passion for reading
His estate gets him a 2000 pounds per year and added to which,
He has five daughters to marry off
But he is unconcerned and Mrs. Bennett is hoping to make brilliant matches for her daughers
Their difference in character, as husband and wife, is brought out right in the beginning
When he makes a sarcastic remark to his wife's effusive narration of their time at the ball
And protests to detailed description of finery;

And I was positive that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet which brought out the
Ensuing series with the famous detective, Sherlock Holmes,
(Along with having a father who raises his girl child beautifully in Mormon country, Utah,
And sees her grown up into a beautiful and loving daughter,
Who falls in love with a young man
Surely, not a crime, you wonder aloud, dear reader,
But it was because the act of love was contrary to the Mormon law of the land
For she had to marry a committee man (if I remember correctly)
And this results in an escapade of the daughter and her lover to the mountains
Where they are killed
And the resulting revenge of the father who had to avenge the tragic murder of his daughter and son-in-law
Is excused by Sherlock Holmes) ,
Had a character who hails from Canada, where there is verdure in the spring and summer
With flowers gaily bordering sidewalks,
And where there are winters that can be charming and autumns that are colourfully busy
But that is an entirely different book, The Hound of the Baskervilles,
Where a character of significance who has lost one of his boots,
Has spent most of his life in Canada and the USA;

Of Canadian fathers who is Papa Trudeau, who as my son,
In response to my observation that Pierre Elliott Trudeau
Fashioned Canada's future with rewriting the Canadian constitution
And bringing in the universal health care, etc,
Put it is like saying the sky is blue
We will see where PM Justin Trudeau further takes us,
For as the fortunes of Canadians go, despite the misfortune of the COVID-19 virus pandemic,
It is good ground that we tread under the exemplary leadership of Justin Trudeau.