From Father to Son

De: Philip Levin

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

My father retired at 65, picked up a pen, and commenced writing poems. Over the next twenty-five years he created hundreds of poems, vignettes of his life: love of his wife, adventures of travel, and the inevitable erosion of aging. Each piece he constructed carefully, laboriously choosing words and phrases to fit his favorite structure, the sonnet, though he occasionally used other formats, including limericks. I began writing as a child, inspired by my mother, a professional author who published thirty books and over a thousand articles in her ninety years. At age 60 I began writing poetry too, and, like my father, found the genre a unique format for creating carefully constructed stories of pithy stories and emotions. This book contains about a hundred poems, a mixture of my father’s and mine, similar themes yet different, as men from different generations naturally have different perspectives in their views of the world. A few explanations and photos add to the effects, mini-biographies in verse. I recommend a slow read, take the time to savor each poem, and think of the loving men who wrote them.