A Story
Sad is the man who is asked for a story
and can’t come up with one.
His five-year-old son waits in his lap.
Not the same story, Baba. A new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.
In a room full of books in a world
of stories, he can recall
not one, and soon, he thinks, the boy
will give up on his father.
Already the man lives far ahead, he sees
the day this boy will go. Don’t go!
Hear the alligator story! The angel story once more!
You love the spider story. You laugh at the spider.
Let me tell it!
But the boy is packing his shirts,
he is looking for his keys. Are you a god,
the man screams, that I sit mute before you?
Am I a god that I should never disappoint?
But the boy is here. Please, Baba, a story?
It is an emotional rather than logical equation,
an earthly rather than heavenly one,
which posits that a boy’s supplications
and a father’s love add up to silence.
Notes
Joy Harjo's Remember asks us to recognize the people and histories that make us who we are. In Li-Young Lee's A Story, that connection becomes painfully intimate. A young boy asks his father for a story, and the father, unable to think of one, suddenly imagines a future in which his son will grow up and no longer need him. There is something unsettling about how easily love can turn into an awareness of loss. The father is sitting beside his child, yet his mind has already carried him into a future where that closeness has changed. We experience time this way more often than we realize, allowing the fear of what might disappear to enter moments that are still entirely ours. October's decay takes a quieter form here. No one has died, nothing has visibly fallen apart, and the boy is still waiting for his story. Yet the father has already begun grieving a version of their relationship that has not ended. #family #LiYoungLee #fatherhood #growingup #Poetry
Li-Young Lee, "A Story" from The City in Which I Love You. Copyright © 1990 by Li-Young Lee.