'Mio Padre e la Quattro Stagione'

'My Father and the Four Seasons', was written to commemorate what would have been my father's 100th birthday - May 5th 2025.

The poem concerns, myself, a 66 year-old person, visiting some of the scenes of his childhood to commune with his past and remember his father.

The poem is set on the Graig mountain, overlooking Pontypridd. But, since my father was Ukrainian, there are also references to that country; for example, the word 'borderland' - roughly translated, Ukraine means borderland. Then, in the Coda, there's mention of the Holodomor - the Ukrainian famine of the early-1930s.

My father was a survivor, someone who endured an enormous amount of suffering: civil war; famine; Nazi invasion; slave labour camps; an American thousand bomber raid; and, a coal mine. Hence the evocation of Aeschylus, with the eagle and tortoise, and 'wisdom born of suffering'.

For people interested in form and structure, I believe the poem is comprised, initially, of quatrains, written in iambic tetrameter, with later stanzas of iambic pentameter (elegaic stanzas).

The poem makes mention of poets I admire, like Robert Frost and Thomas Hardy, but there are also nods to Idris Davies, Shakespeare and even Ernest Hemingway.

I like the cinematic quality of scenes in this poem: hands clasping hands that held a ball, for a geography lesson; whirlwinds of leaves snaking around; and the way, when you're a young child running downhill, the mountain seems to dance under your feet to catch you.

I also like the two worlds that are conjured: one of industrial time and one of 'dandelion time'; the harsh adult world and the innocent world of childhood.

Finally, I have to say that I have written a few poems, now, but I hope this one does its subject justice, since my father was the best man I ever knew.