Fellow Fathers

By Ben Calica
A poem for my fellow fathers, the ones who have to teach their kids to keep their hands visible…

my shame and apology can never be enough

for tsking on the sidelines at another of the world’s great wrongs

while you taught your children skills

not just to look both ways, to not talk to strangers, to not reach in to the dancing flames…

skills to provide no excuse, no offense, no insult,

to be wisely afraid

to have show strength by being meek

to endure insult to protect against injury

to protect against death…

to offer as sacrifice, as tribute, a part of who they were so they could live to live another day

not skills for a thing that might happen, for a thing that would happen…

skills to stay safe when they were dealing with those who were supposed to keep them safe

My shame brings you no comfort

My guilt over letting this stand without doing anything is of no value

unless it makes me do something

But we share something

We are fathers

We have realized together that it is possible to love something more than ourselves

That there is something that we would trade our lives to protect

We have had them rush into our arms, dropping to our knees to catch them.

We have held them we thought their fevers would never break

We have watched them make terrible mistakes, and made mistakes of our own

We have fought with them, and been hurt deeper than we thought possible

We have watched them open like flowers to become something we never knew was possible

and we sent them out in the world, outside the fences of protection we built so they could discover the strength we see in them

But you have had to teach them to be afraid, and to deal with a danger from those that we have given the job of keeping us safe.

You have had to teach them to keep their chins up after needing to look to the ground, to keep their hands where they could be seen, to not talk back.

It feels like too little, too late, and regardless of how that feels, there is nothing I can say or do to make up for how long this has been happening.

All I can do is be a father with you, and not stop, not let the pit in my heart go away until this is truly no more.

The world is full of piles of wrongs, so high it feels like we flitter to them one to the next, talking about how bad they are till the next comes to the top.

I don’t know what my shoulder will do on this wheel, but I’m not taking it off till it gets fixed.

And though I write this to you, it is really for those other fathers who do not live this every day, who do not have to teach their kids to keep their hands where the police can see them.

For those of us who never had to teach their kids to keep their hands visible if they were stopped by police, who never had to think of the police as a high risk group, who stood by and heard this happen…

Feel bad.

Feel unbearingly, overwhelmingly, unsustainably bad.

There should be a pit burning in our stomach like we just watched a child be killed in front of us.

A child we could have saved.

A shame we could have stopped.

We should feel awful. We should feel like we can’t live with ourselves.

Every single day, without stop, without relief.

And in its core, in the searing heart of it, should be the burning feeling that if that happens again, we wouldn’t stand by, we wouldn’t be quiet, we would step in and stop it.

And then we need to realize that we are seeing that knife raise up again to strike the next child. We are watching it, knowing that it will happen again unless we stop it. And this time, when it happens, we will know it was our fault.

And from that, we act. We don’t let it fade into the screaming hands of a world full of wrongs.

We reach out, and we make sure it stops.

And we only feel good, we only feel right with ourselves again, when it is done.

We act today.

and tomorrow

and after that

until no other father has to feel that fear in the pit of their stomach, fear of the people who are supposed to keep us safe.

Then we can start to work on the impossibly big apology that will be too little.

And we work on creating the world where And we work on creating a world where our kids,

or theirs,

or theirs

grow up without realizing that the apology is needed,

because the wrongs are not now,

their echos do not continue to warp the world.

they are just history.

because that is the only apology that counts.