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International Fellowship on Reconciliation
Join the International Fellowship on Reconciliation’s Women Peacemakers Program in training women and men to act together to ameliorate conflict.
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Coaching Boys into Men
Everyone needs role models. Join athletic coaches from around the U.S. as they train the next generation of men about the attitudes and behaviors that can lead to violence against women.
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| STATISTICS: |
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| | • | The 2005 Gallup International Poll surveyed 50,000 people from 60 countries to see what matters most in life to them. 42.7% rated “good health,” 40.1% rated “happy family life,” 23.1% rated “a job.” The following aspects were selected in descending order: “freedom,” “no war,” “no violence and corruption,” “standard of living,” “faithful to religion,” and “an education.” | | | • | Recent research in Scandinavia determined that men are capable of involved parenting and changes to traditional gender practices when there is support from the state, and especially when paid paternity leave is available. | |
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The small metal rocket jigs on its fins, a mean drunk
unzipping himself, then a whistle of slag – death's
catcall – two inches away from my father's ear.
He lifts his eyes above the Iowa cornfields
as his second try arcs across a daytime moon.
Even childhood has overlapping edges, weaknesses
imperfectly soldered together. Light flares
out from a tin can full of fuel, bores through the basement
ceiling and flays the skin from his best friend's hand.
A wound opens in metal. In our classroom, the Challenger blooms –
marigold on frosted blue glass – streaks down like spilled
cream, clotting and forking. I press my hand to the flickering
screen. Later we swing in the park, chain links creaking,
weighing the difference between rocket and bomb.
The wound keeps opening: in skyscrapers, in levy walls,
petals spreading in a summer wind. When they took out my appendix,
my soul tried to take flight. My wife bears a matching scar where our son
emerged without a heartbeat. Indelible, we trace the mark – singed
trajectory, comet trail, the liquid-pink of flesh joined to flesh
after some bright unfurling.
***
My generation seems driven by a desire to connect. In order to achieve this, we have embraced vast artificial networks from cell phones to the internet. They are always on, always available, providing information at an accelerating rate. As a result, everything seems to be happening at once: mass media constantly present us with the experience of shared catastrophes, but we lack the means to interpret them in the context of our personal lives. Instead, we are bombarded by mind-numbing statistics, news-speak, and sound bites.
In this poem, my earliest memory of a shared catastrophe, and that of many in my generation – the Challenger explosion – intersects with my father's stories of amateur rocketry during the space race of the 1950s and with my own experience of losing a child.
The archetypal role of motherhood is often seen to be nurturing; the role of fatherhood to protect. But how can fathers protect their children in a world of seemingly ubiquitous disaster? The art of telling imaginative stories, passed down for my father, has helped me interrelate and objectify other personal and shared experiences such as 9/11, Katrina, my own near-death experience during a routine surgery, and the recent death of our infant son– all within the context of poetic thought.
I have set out to be a positive force in poetry. Part of what attracts me to this form is the opportunity to reclaim language from the high-tech world of nonstop news and to refocus experiences that are both deeply personal and yet shared . It is from that place that we can transcend the details of thought or experience into a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. This is the project of my life and work.
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I've been a step dad for the past 2 1/2 years, since I was 50. It is sad that because his real dad does not want to have anything to do with him, he makes up lies and tries to create friction with his mom and I, and of course he wants all...
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