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The Green Man, pagan ruler of Midsummer. |
It's Father’s Day, a minor American demi-holiday and Summer Solstice, an astronomical phenomenon with mythic trappings. Such calendar coincidences move me to the commission of poetry like a prune juice and X-Lax smoothie facilitates an explosive bowl movement. Depending on your outlook the results may be equally as messy and disgusting.
Some ancient peoples marked the Solstice with such astonishing precision involving monoliths, mounds, and monuments that it has enabled a basic cable cottage industry of pseudo-science documentaries speculating about aliens. But for many others, the precise date was hard to pin down. Changes to the length of day were too subtle to be measured precisely. Instead, they spread out the celebration over a cluster of days under various names. Modern Pagans, who have made up a lot of stuff to fill in the gaps of what is known call those days Litha after and old Anglo-Saxon name for a summer month. Taken together the various pre-Christian celebrations are often lumped together as Midsummer, as good a name as any.
The Old Man as Greenman ready to sprout oakleaves and acorns with minion.
Was Father’s day, at least subconsciously set in spitting distance of Midsummer if not on the precise day? No, but there are those who say that there is no such thing as pure coincidence. Call it kismet or serendipity, it was enough to set my head spinning and impel my fingers on the keyboard.
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My father, W. M. Murfin in Cheyenne, 1959. |
Summer Solstice/Father’s Day
June 21, 2015
Perhaps, after all, I am the Green Man,
and my Father before me
who took to the woods with rod and rifle
and his father before him
who grew strawberries by the porch
and the fathers before him
who were orchard men in Ohio
and back to those earlier yet
who pulled stones from Cornish fields
for their masters.
Save the complexion, I look the part enough
With shaggy goatee, wild eyebrows,
and neglected hair which could sprout
oak and ivy.
But my wild forest years are well behind me,
I plant nothing but my feet on the sidewalk
and my butt in a desk chair,
I raise nothing but questions, concerns,
and indignation,
my fertility was snipped away
long decades past
my virility—don’t make me laugh,
no Goddess awaits in a glade
under the triumphant Sun.
Perhaps I am not the Green Man after all
just an old fool and fraud,
but, hey, isn’t that all that is needed
to be just Dad instead.
—Patrick Murfin
