Brett Rutherford's Poem 'All I Know About My Father'

“All I know About My Father” 1989 by Brett Rutherford

This is a poem from the viewpoint of a son reflecting on the relationship or lack thereof with his father. The son reflects on the void, the emptiness of a vacant place at table, which he describes as a self-erasing memory. To me this signifies that he tries to forget the fact that his father was not part of the family but an empty chair at home. The son turns to a memory of his father showing him places on a globe, seeing a scrapbook that his father was not very open with. The picture that stood out in his memory was one of war, where his father had a German medal, his father in uniform with a scenery of tanks and other soldiers. He recalls his fathers jobs including a time where his

father played jazz at taverns and even heard him on the radio. The son tried to play the father’s clarinet, just once but his father ‘yanked it away’.
The culmination of his father’s memory is that his father was in the home for 13 years but felt that his father purposefully kept distance between himself and his sons.

He follows with that the memory he has of his father is of a voice who fought with his mother, slept on the couch, and then slept somewhere else. It doesn’t seem the father was part of this son’s life any more after that, until one day when he was 17 he got a call from his dad while at school saying he would meet him. There is hope in the son’s wondering what might his father have to say, what new beginnings…alas his father said to him ‘sign this’. The father wants to cash in an insurance policy that he had on his sons, then speeds off after it is signed, however the son never told anyone. This act is the finality of any hope of a relationship with his

father.
The poem ends with that whenever someone asks ‘Your father?’ He shrugs and reflects that:
“He is an empty space,
a vacuum where no birds can fly,
a moon with no planet,
an empty galaxy
where gravity repels
and dark suns hoard their light.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXDU2OXvhi4
Video: The Role of a Father—and the Effect of an Absent One, Oprah’s Life Class, Oprah Winfrey Network.
This is a short clip of Oprah Winfrey speaking with Iyanla Vanzant about the role of the father and the effect of one not present. The question asked was what is the role of the father? Vanzant answers with “Protector, provider, and to be a model, a demonstration of what it is to be a man, and how a man needs to be…” For boys it’s like looking in a mirror on how they get to see their gender role played out as a man.
Roland Warren who was the former President of the National Fatherhood Institute, was a guest speaker, he believes that kids have a hole in the soul in the shape of their father, in particular, for the male children.

This is a place where if not filled by their father it leaves a wound that is not easily healed. Warren says statistics show that for children who is trying to understand that “it is difficult to be what you don’t see and become what you didn’t have.” The consequences of that hole for men, is more profound. It is difficult for men to express their feelings and to say that they feel a void, a hole because they didn’t have a

father.
This video resonated with me because the poem that I read referred to the place where his father’s memory should be as an empty space and here it refers to the place of the father if not filled as a hole in the soul. As a society we need to encourage fatherhood, we need other men to step in and be role models for boys without fathers so they may have a chance of learning positive roles to be a good man and father.