For June · 5 poems & readings

Father's Day Poems

For the steady ones: poems for dads, grandfathers, and father figures — warm, plainspoken, and card-ready.

Father's Day verse has to clear a particular obstacle: its audience claims not to want it. The solution is the plainspoken poem — short, concrete, more evidence than adjective. Robert Hayden's 'Those Winter Sundays,' with its father warming the house in the blueblack cold, is the patron poem of the whole genre: love measured in labor nobody thanked him for at the time.

For the card itself, two modes work. Funny — his jokes, his thermostat policies, his relationship with the barbecue — or sincere, kept short enough that neither of you has to make eye contact afterward. Either way, end with a plain thank-you. It will be deflected and treasured in the same motion.