
Lucille Clifton ends her poem “Forgiving my Father” with the lines: “daddy old pauper old prisoner, old dead man / what am i doing here collecting?” (256); however, neither her tone nor her word choice give off a very forgiving feel.  As the reader begins to make sense of the relationship Clifton had with her deceased father, it becomes evident that this mentioned forgiveness has a deeper meaning.  She quickly paints a picture of poverty and a father’s lack of financial or other contribution.  Growing up in this disheveled environment, the author romanticizes the idea of wealth and a close-knit family and blames her absent father for their inadequacy.  By including words that carry a negative monetary connotation such as “bills”, “paying” and “payday”, Clifton depicts a childhood devoid of luxury and dares her readers to question her misleading title and dive further into the idea of forgiveness.

In the average family dynamic, the father is the main breadwinner for the household.  However, Lucille Clifton’s childhood was full of watching her father come home, week after week, with nothing to show for.  She described her father by saying “you are the pocket that was going to open / and come up empty any Friday” (Clifton 526).  For most families, Friday, or at least every other Friday, is payday and necessities that could not previously be afforded can often be bought.  The reliability of that paycheck coming in is able to put most struggling families at ease.  But Clifton was not able to see her family feel the security of a breadwinner’s paycheck each week, and as a child, this would have taught her things many of her peers were too young and inexperienced to realize.  In one part of the poem, she describes her father as an “old lecher” (Clifton 525), which creates a powerful image for the reader.  Just like a leech attaches to a host and drains its blood, the father evidently latched onto other sources to survive, instead of making a living on his own with no concern for his family.  

While the father clearly lacked any effort to provide any type of monetary contribution to his family, he also failed to make contributions in other ways as well.  Not only does Clifton not mention any typical father/daughter interactions, she also makes one specific statement that reassures the reader that the father was absent in all aspects.  Speaking to her father, in reference to her mother, Clifton states that “you gave her all you had / which was nothing” (525).  In this sense, “all” expands the realm of just money.  Not only did the father lack money to provide, but he failed to play the role of the father as well.  Had he been around to help the mother or to raise the daughter, Clifton would not have been able to make the statement that he had given the mother nothing.  She also refers to her father at one point as an “old liar” (525).  This too adds more to the father’s personality.  Although it is unclear what he lied about, it still creates a problem within their dynamic.  The father was not a desirable man; instead of bringing things to the family, he added baggage and took what little they did have away from them.

Despite the father’s downfalls, he does not seem to be making all of the mistakes on his own.  The mother is only mentioned two separate times in the text, but these lines, or maybe lack thereof, present the mother as one who is unaware of how to solve her own problems.  The first time Clifton mentions her mother, she writes, “but today is payday, payday old man / my mother’s hand opens in her early grave / and i hold it out like a good daughter” (525).  The image of holding out her hand is reminiscent of a beggar.  The father has failed to provide in the past, but yet she still waits and begs for something from him.  Later in the poem, Clifton includes another line that mentions the mother: “you were each other’s bad bargain, not mine” (526).  Growing up in an unstable, poor family would have made the author grow up quicker than most children and in this line she seems to realize that.  Even though the parents were the ones continually failing, Clifton was the one to suffer the most.  From the time she was very little, until the time her father passed away, she probably witnessed a magnitude of arguments and money struggles.  Although this is not a rare situation in society, this is no environment to bring up a child in.

Taking all of this into consideration, Clifton’s speech to her father by his grave has little resemblance to one of forgiveness.  Her underlying tone seeps resentment with phrases like “all week you have stood in my dreams / like a ghost, asking for more time” (Clifton 525).  But yet, she still titled her piece “Forgiving my Father”, a father who is dead and can no longer work to try to show the author a better life.  At times, forgiveness is less about the individual and more about allowing oneself to let go of a situation in order to move forward.  The deeper this poem is analyzed, the more apparent it becomes that Clifton’s forgiveness is more for herself than for her father.  She sits by his grave and recounts these difficult aspects of her life not because she is okay with his lack of family involvement, but because she needs to move past her childhood, therefore giving full meaning to her bold choice of a title.

Lucille Clifton’s poem “Forgiving my Father” depicts a difficult family structure that resulted in immense poverty.  Her chosen vocabulary relays the severity of the situation and the ever-present lack of contribution from the father.  And as if money was all that was needed to solve their families problems, Clifton told her father “i wish you were rich so i could take it all / and give the lady what she was due” (Clifton 525).  However, after growing up in this setting, it is no wonder Clifton glamorized the idea of wealth.  The reader must also develop a new meaning for “forgiveness”, as Clifton does not immediately come off as a forgiving daughter.  However, the reader is finally able to realize that the forgiveness was not for the father, but for the author herself.
