Forgiving My Father

The poem “Forgiving My Father” by Lucille Clifton tells of daughter who is resentful of her father who is dead.  In the first stanza the poet says “It is Friday. We have come to the paying of the bills.  All week you have stood in my dreams like a ghost, asking for more time but today is pay day, pay day old man”, she is resentful that her father is not there to help pay the bills.  Throughout the poem she speaks very unkindly about her father.  She calls him things such as old liar, old pauper, old prisoner, and old dead man.  She expresses that he did not treat her mother right.  She states in line 14-18 “You gave her all you had which was nothing.  You have already given her all you had.  You are the pocket that was going to open and come up empty any Friday.”  In these lines she is saying that her father was not giving her mother money to pay the bills.  Throughout the poem you are expecting the daughter to forgive the father but she never does.  She blames him for debts she has to pay and is not sympathetic even in his death. She blames him for the life she is living now and the terrible life her mother lead. This poem expresses a daughter’s feelings for a father she hated and how her unhappiness is a result of an unfeeling and penniless father that didn’t try to improve his life, his wife’s or hers.