Yusef Komunyakaa - My Father's Loveletters

Yusef Komunyakaa – My Father’s Loveletters pg. 511
When you read the title of the poem, you feel that the poem would have a subtle, yet romantic tone to it. It starts off with the daughter talking about writing the same letter to her mother, which then I assumed that the mother must have passed away and the father was getting so old that this was his only way of still talking with his late wife. My motivations were skewed and I couldn’t have been more off the target. Down a few lines it says, “He’d beg her to return & promised to never beat her again” (pg. 511). Now the entire tone and emotion changes instantly in the poem. Not knowing the daughter at all, I feel that as she was writing the letters, she was resentful or spiteful towards her father, yet she still complied. The speaker was offering a side to her father, that although was remorseful, he had a lot to be trying to make up for. She talks about what she feels that her mother would be doing as she read the letters and she replies, “I wondered if she’d laugh as she held them over a flame” (pg. 511). This poem leaves me in a clouded mystery, of what the story is behind the loveletters.