One Parent Family by John Kitching

First published 7 February 2002

This one's a very short (eight-line) poem from a child's point of view, expressing a longing to have more than "a weekend dad". This is an interesting rhythm indeed. Right now I can't be bothered looking up the names of feet to analyse it fully. Suffice, for now, to say that the first three lines seem to be four feet long, the next two three, and the last three four.

But anyway, this is supposed to be a personal response, not a technical analysis. Of course the poem is sad; simply, almost naively so, and it is all the more poignant in its naivete. The child's situation is one he shares with hundreds, maybe thousands of other children, and yet it seems none the less tragic for that. ("Tragic" is not quite the word there, but I'm unsure of what is.)

I love simple-looking poems. In this one, I particularly like "… a dad who shakes/the dust of Sunday from his feet". "mother's peeling five-day door" is also interesting.

"Sourly dumped" puzzles me somewhat. More specifically, the "sourly" does. I do not understand why the father is sour - this implies some dislike of the father on the part of the child.

How naive of me. At the age of 16, I clearly thought that the married parties were the only ones to suffer in the case of marital failure. Somehow I assumed that both parents would continue to love their children equally both before and after the divorce. This was a rather silly thing to assume - of course the father dislikes his children, that's the whole point of the freakin' poem, innit.

The reader doesn't know if it is or not, of course, so here is the poem from memory. (This is one of the few things I've retained in detail from high school English.)

I wish that I had more than just
A weekend dad, a dad who shakes
The dust of Sunday from his feet
And makes his short drive home
When we've been sourly dumped
At mother's peeling five-day door.
It isn't only childish greed
That makes me want my father more.

Now that is lovely. I've seldom heard human misery captured so simply and honestly as it is in those eight lines. Note especially the evocative terms "dust" and "peeling", together with the shortness of the drive (emphasised by being mentioned in the two shorter lines). Why didn't I notice the elegance of this verse back in sixth form?

The rhythm structure is actually comprised entirely of iambic feet - quadrameter for lines 1-3 and 6-8, and trimeter for lines four and five. It's such a simple meter that the voice of the child comes through quite clearly, and it allows for nice short words that carry the meaning off. A perfect choice of structure for the material, it just makes the whole thing.