I’m immensely grateful to the excellent team at The Good Men Project for publishing this poem. (Stay tuned for more in a series on the theme of toxic masculinity.)
What Gets Heard When Men Won’t Speak
Clichés come to being initially as truths,
derived from the first source: experience;
then as memories becoming re-enactments,
handed down and forever accumulating
their own congenital weights and meanings.
Rare is the man who can say the word love
without feeling it, having never known it.
The father unable (or worse, unwilling) to say
these words to a son (or worse, a daughter) is
only partly to blame, he’s wounded by the ones
who didn’t (or worse, couldn’t) tell or teach him.
Thus we inherit a world where hardness is
inculcated and tenderness abhorrent; where
we countenance war; the atrocity of unfed babies
and grown-ups living outdoors, of those in need.
We’ve made a divine right of might, all in spite
of what could have been if those imitating acts
received as ritual had instead perceived softness;
were encouraged to find strength by seeing frailty
in others; had been taught that the more one takes
the smaller one becomes; the only hope for healing
is to purposefully give away all the precious things
those who can’t speak suffocate through silence.
