Knock Knock by Daniel Beaty

Summary

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.

Knock Knock by Daniel Beaty

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.

 Yiayia

Written and performed by Luka Lesson.

 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

First Time (I Met My Grandmother)

By Ali Cobby Eckermann

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!

Ali Cobby Eckermann

Feliks Skrzynecki

By Peter Skrzynecki 

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.