“Little Father” by Li-Young Lee

Credit: Engin Akyurt

I buried my father
in the sky.
Since then, the birds
clean and comb him every morning
and pull the blanket up to his chin
every night.

I buried my father underground.
Since then, my ladders
only climb down,
and all the earth has become a house
whose rooms are the hours, whose doors
stand open at evening, receiving
guest after guest.
Sometimes I see past them
to the tables spread for a wedding feast.

I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
my little root who won’t drink milk,
little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,
little clock spring newly wet
in the fire, little grape, parent to the future
wine, a son the fruit of his own son,
little father I ransom with my life.

In “Little Father,” award-winning American poet Li-Young Lee explores the death of his father. Weaving the practical and tangible together with the metaphorical and mythical, Lee invites the reader into a paradoxical world in which his father is both dead and alive; both present and buried, both father and son.

Lee finds his father’s presence in the sky, underground, and in his heart, where he dwells as Lee’s “strange son.” By identifying his father’s spirit as his own offspring, Lee elicits the cyclical nature of life and death, and the manner in which our ancestors live on in us. In the final stanza, Lee uses the word “little” in a repetitive manner that invokes a sense of nurturing or caretaking, suggesting the attention required to grow our predecessors’ lives into our own futures.

As the descendent of a powerful Chinese family, Lee knows something of legacy. Born in exile in Indonesia to Chinese parents, Lee immigrated to the United States as a child due to rising anti-Chinese sentiment. His grandfather was the first president of the Rebublic of China, and his father, who was once a personal physician to Mao Zedong, later became a Presbyterian minister. “Little Father” appeared in Lee’s 2001 book of poetry “Book of My Nights.”