Section 4 Exercise 9Loss of a parent
Because everybody eventually suffers the loss of their parents, unless they themselves die first, the poetry of grieving these deaths would fill a library. This is a poem that can be given to friends and patients, providing comfort. Listen to the following audiotape, reading the accompanying text .
Michael Dennis Browne, "On the Anniversary" 
The only doors that I know
for you to come through are within,
and there you have appeared
from time to time
may appear again.
Old son that I am,
I welcome my wandering father
when he wills—
let him come, let him go
any hour, arriving
with no warning, leaving
with no assurances.
Saying goodnight last night
to my boy, I could hear you;
carrying my dreaming girl
to her proper bed, I remembered
your own pale body
our final summer,
the veins blue as rivers
as you led us to water.
Wherever the son
may travel, let there be
doors without number
where the father may enter.
Michael Dennis Browne, Selected Poems 1965-1995 Carnegie Mellon University Press Pittsburgh 1997
Study questions
- How is losing a parent different from losing a child? Compare the emotional tone and content with that of the poems on the loss of a child.
- Related to question 1, comment on the life cycle and the speaker’s awareness of his own mortality in this poem.
- Poems are often allusive—their images resonate, provoking the reader into making connections. Interpret the lines: “…the veins blue as rivers/as you led us to water.” What comfort do they suggest?
- Consider some formal aspects of the poem: the fact that the lines are continuous sentences or that there is a line break at let there be doors/without number. How do these anchor the theme of the poem?
From handbook on loss of a parent
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