Black Daddies Club: Love Letter – A Prose Poem
Ajani and his Daddy
By Colwyn Burchall, Jr.
It’s 3:17 a.m.
I have just rocked you back to sleep to the ethereal sounds of the immortal Donny Hathaway. He is singing his classic, “A Song For You”:
“I love you in a place, / where there’s no space or time….”
My Heart,
Sometimes I watch you as you sleep, just to get a glimpse of what unmarred happiness actually looks like.
You smile at some inside joke that you share only with the actors in a comedic dream, playing at REM speed, behind your shuttered eyes.
We are at our most perfect, our most knowing – our Spirits light with the full-bellied simplicity of reality unencumbered by limiting, crippling interpretations – when we are young.
Life simply is. And we (the Child) instinctively, joyously, embrace it all…without fear, without doubt.
When – and, more importantly, why – does our movement to adulthood strip us of this womb-shaped wisdom?
You are blissfully silent, refusing to answer my unasked question.
What secrets you know and keep in the sacred space guarded by your virgin Soul may never be revealed, may never take clumsy flight in spoken form.
And that may well be a good thing, I think.
Because – as several thousand years of organized religion has shown us – divine truths can be cruelly diminished by ham-fisted efforts to shape them, by force of words, into a recognizable, easily-digestible finitude.
Perhaps my duty as your Father is to fashion myself into a strongbox for the preservation of your innocence.
Perhaps we, Black Fathers, are meant to be the safe haven for our precious Seed, without which their ways of knowing are doomed to be dashed unmercifully against the jagged and unyielding granite of a hostile, hateful world.
Perhaps this is the duty of all Black Fathers.
I`ll hold you, my precious sapling, tenderly against my chest as the storm rages and screams around us. Back bent, muscles taut with exertion, I’ll whisper ‘Love, love!’ in your ear, over the howling of the winds of hatred and bigotry that threaten to tear you from my arms.
They’ll not claim you without a fight, my Sun. Sometimes the Future can only be born through the blood of the Present. I know this to be true.
So be it, then.
“…and when my life is over, / remember when we were together, / we were alone, / and I was singing a song to you….”
Yours Beyond Forever,
Dad
Colwyn Burchall is a freelance writer, BDC member and father of two beautiful Suns.
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