Fishing With Dad
Fishing With Dad
At dawn the boy watched father bait the line And learned how silence keeps a tender weight; The river took the sky in broken shine, While minnows tapped like questions at the bait.
No sermon passed between the reel and hand, Just knots retied, a thermos, bread, and sun; A snagged hook drew no curse from that worn hand, He smiled as if lost battles could be won.
Years teach the boy what mornings would not say: The fish were never all they came to seek; A father gives what sons can throw away, Then waits for love to surface, shy and weak.
Some lessons bite when teachers leave the shore; The empty creel can carry so much more.
The poem keeps the fishing trip plain because that is where the truth sits. A father does not always explain himself well, and a son rarely understands the gift while it is being handed over. The tackle, the bait, the quiet, the small corrections, the absence of anger when something goes wrong, all of it becomes a kind of language. The fish are almost beside the point. What remains is the strange fact that ordinary mornings can keep speaking long after the man who made them ordinary is gone.
– Doc