In stanza one, Larkin claims . . . . (use a quote to support your response)
He develops this idea in stanza two by saying . . . . . (use a quote to support your response)
Larkin's solution to the problems of families is revealed in stanza three as being . . . (use a quote to support your response)
The narrator recounts a game he played with his father as a child and how his father stopped playing this game when he went to prison. He addresses his father, asking him to come home and explaining how he misses him. The poem finishes with the father addressing his son, encouraging him to knock down barriers and change the world.
As a boy I shared a game with my father.
Played it every morning 'til I was 3.
He would knock knock on my door,
and I'd pretend to be asleep
'til he got right next to the bed,
Then I would get up and jump into his arms.
"Good morning, Papa."
And my papa he would tell me that he loved me.
We shared a game.
Knock Knock
Until that day when the knock never came
and my momma takes me on a ride past corn fields
on this never ending highway 'til we reach a place of
high rusty gates.
A confused little boy,
I entered the building carried in my mama's arms.
Knock Knock
We reach a room of windows and brown faces
behind one of the windows sits my father.
I jump out of my mama's arms
and run joyously towards my papa
Only to be confronted by this window.
I knock knock trying to break through the glass,
trying to get to my father.
I knock knock as my mama pulls me away
before my papa even says a word.
And for years he has never said a word.
And so twenty-five years later, I write these words
for the little boy in me who still awaits his papa's knock.
Papa, come home 'cause I miss you.
I miss you waking me up in the morning and telling me you love me.
Papa, come home, 'cause there's things I don't know,
and I thought maybe you could teach me:
How to shave;
how to dribble a ball;
how to talk to a lady;
how to walk like a man.
Papa, come home because I decided a while back
I wanted to be just like you.
but I'm forgetting who you are.
And twenty-five years later a little boy cries,
and so I write these words and try to heal
and try to father myself
and I dream up a father who says the words my father did not.
Dear Son,
I'm sorry I never came home.
For every lesson I failed to teach, hear these words:
Shave in one direction in strong deliberate strokes to avoid irritation
Dribble the page with the brilliance of your ballpoint pen.
Walk like a god and your goddess will come to you.
No longer will I be there to knock on your door,
So you must learn to knock for yourself.
Knock knock down doors of racism and poverty that I could not.
Knock knock down doors of opportunity
for the lost brilliance of the black men who crowd these cells.
Knock knock with diligence for the sake of your children.
Knock knock for me for as long as you are free,
these prison gates cannot contain my spirit.
The best of me still lives in you.
Knock knock with the knowledge that you are my son, but you are not my choices.
Yes, we are our fathers' sons and daughters,
But we are not their choices.
For despite their absences we are still here.
Still alive, still breathing
With the power to change this world,
One little boy and girl at a time.
Knock knock
Who's there?
We are.
My Grandmother
grew up between two wars in Greece
lost her brother Xristo to the Germans
and named my mother Xristina after him
Rare for a Greek woman she had a divorce at 50
has lived for 30 years by herself with his photos still in the spare room
She is a green thumb
She makes cordial from her own mandarins
drinks tea from her own chamomile bush
and picks and tomatoes from her garden whenever I say I feel like a salata
She hardly went to school
But one day when talking of my time at university
and admiring all three different types of basil she has growing in her garden
she says to me:
"Eat two leaves basil everyday
good for the blood
good for the brain
- the don't teach that university"
and when my brother Eliah says to her:
"You know Yiayia - you know a lot...you're really smart."
She always says:
"Yes Eliah, I'm a very ...education"
So recently I decided to ask my Yiayia what she thought about racism
and whether it was ok that Greeks still hate the Turks
for what they did in the past
and she said:
"Just because some people naughty,
doesn't mean you throw the rest in the rubbish!"
Her name is Katerina Batounas
but her maiden name is Sarandavga
Sarandavga literally means 'forty eggs'
and as the story goes one of her great-grandfathers
was challenged by one of the other villagers
to see if he could eat an omelette of forty eggs without getting sick
Anyone that knows my appetite
will know that I'm proud to say
...he won that bet
And so his nickname 'forty-eggs' was then turned into the family name
and was passed down every generation
to my Yiayia
and today
it's her birthday
so I tell her what we always do
'Na ekatostisis', 'May you live to one hundred'
but she is 83
so instead of thanking me she says -
"oh god me!
a hundred
no thank you
i have enough
maybe couple more years ...then I go to sleep"
Where will you go to sleep Yiayia?
"in the cemetery
I already I buy a little house there...
I don't afraid!"
Until then she will keep calling me to see if I am too cold living in Melbourne
keep stooping me from doing the dishes after she cooks us a meal
keep trying to slip a fifty dollar note every time I visit
and keep telling me:
"Eat two leaves basil everyday
good for the blood
good for the brain"
They don't teach you that at university
Sit down in the dirt and brush away the flies
Sit down in the dirt and avoid the many eyes
I never done no wrong to you, so why you look at me?
But if you gotta check me out, well go ahead – feel free!
I feel that magic thing you do, you crawl beneath my skin
To read the story of my Soul, to find out where I been
And now yous’ mob you make me wait, so I just sit and sit
English words seem useless, I know Language just a bit
I sit quiet way, not lonely, ’cos this country sings loud Songs
I never been out here before, but I feel like I belong
It’s three days now, the mob comes back, big smiles are on their face
‘This your Grandmother’s Country here, this is your homeland place’
‘We got a shock when we seen you, you got your Nana’s face
We was real sad when she went missing in that cold Port Pirie place’
I understand the feelings now, tears push behind my eyes
I’ll sit on this soil anytime, and brush away the flies
I’ll dance with mob on this red Land, munda wiru place
I’ll dance away them half caste lies ’cos I got my Nana’s face!
Feliks Skrzynecki
My gentle father
Kept pace only with the Joneses
Of his own mind’s making –
Loved his garden like an only child,
Spent years walking its perimeter
From sunrise to sleep.
Alert, brisk and silent,
He swept its paths
Ten times around the world.
Hands darkened
From cement, fingers with cracks
Like the sods he broke,
I often wondered how he existed
On five or six hours’ sleep each night –
Why his arms didn’t fall off
From the soil he turned
And tobacco he rolled.
His Polish friends
Always shook hands too violently,
I thought… Feliks Skrzynecki,
That formal address
I never got used to.
Talking, they reminisced
About farms where paddocks flowered
With corn and wheat,
Horses they bred, pigs
They were skilled in slaughtering.
Five years of forced labour in Germany
Did not dull the softness of his blue eyes
I never once heard
Him complain of work, the weather
Or pain. When twice
They dug cancer out of his foot,
His comment was: ‘but I’m alive’.
Growing older, I
Remember words he taught me,
Remnants of a language
I inherited unknowingly –
The curse that damned
A crew-cut, grey-haired
Department clerk
Who asked me in dancing-bear grunts:
‘Did your father ever attempt to learn English?’
On the back steps of his house,
Bordered by golden cypress,
Lawns – geraniums younger
Than both parents,
My father sits out the evening
With his dog, smoking,
Watching stars and street lights come on,
Happy as I have never been.
At thirteen,
Stumbling over tenses in Caesar’s Gallic War,
I forgot my first Polish word.
He repeated it so I never forgot.
After that, like a dumb prophet,
Watched me pegging my tents
Further and further south of Hadrian’s Wall.