Daddy
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a
foot
For thirty years, poor and
white,
Barely daring to breathe or
Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill
you.
You died before I had time,
Marble-heavy, a bag full of
God,
Ghastly statue with one gray
toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish
Atlantic
Where it pours bean green
over blue
In the waters off beautiful
Nauset.
I used to pray to recover
you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the
Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is
common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or
two.
So I never could tell where
you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire
snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was
you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz,
Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear
beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and
my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my
Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of
you,
With your Luftwaffe, your
gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright
blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, 0
You
No God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak
through.
Every woman adores a
Fascist,
The boot in the face, the
brute
Brute heart of a brute like
you.
You stand at the blackboard,
daddy,
In the picture I have of
you,
A cleft in your chin instead
of your foot
But no less a devil for
that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in
two.
I was ten when they buried
you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to
you.
I thought even the bones
would do.
But they pulled me out of
the sack,
And they stuck me together
with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a
Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and
the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally
through.
The black telephone's off at
the root,
The voices just can't worm
through.
If I've killed one man, I've
killed two
The vampire who said he was
you
And drank my blood for a
year,
Seven years, if you want to
know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There's a stake in your fat
black heart
And the villagers never
liked you.
They are dancing and
stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard,
I'm through.
12 October 1962