Waiting - Joseph Byrd

for my daughter to come home 

and she is in a car 

I cannot revise this into my preferences 

otherwise she would be a nut in my hand 

she would be that sound my throat makes 

just before falling asleep 

early on she thought she could fly  

I still hold her concussion in my hands  

the paramedic asked her to speak  

he held up her stuffed duck and her throat quacked     

I became a walnut tree  

love comes slowly if it is love 

I made myself wait

I don’t land easily either 

but I do know how the path of descent 

is the only way back up and out 

Bio: Joseph Byrd’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Punt Volat, Pedestal, South Florida Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, Clackamas Literary Review, Many Nice Donkeys, and Novus Literary Arts. He’s a Pushcart Prize nominee, was long-listed for the Erbacce Prize, and was in the StoryBoard Chicago cohort with Kaveh Akbar. An Associate Artist in Poetry under Joy Harjo at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, he is on the Reading Board for The Plentitudes.

Commentary 

This poem accurately sums up a father's suppressed feelings towards her grown daughter and the transformation in their relationship. The fact that a father rarely proclaims his love, rather shows it, is implied by the analogy of the 'Walnut Tree'. Most people, with maturity and adulthood, view the 'old ways of caring' of their parents towards them with a 'question mark'. A father remains a father and his ways remains the same irrespective of how old his children are.