There is always a situation in which one believes it is his or her fault. No matter how many times people try to convince he or she it is not, he or she will still continue to believe it is. However, after enough time passes and he or she looks back, he or she will come to realize that in fact it never was. Lucille Clifton’s “forgiving my father” uses diction and imagery to show a negative relationship and its effect years later in order to argue that in the end one cannot blame himself or herself for other people’s problems. 

In the beginning of this poem the daughter makes it evident that she is in the middle of the divorce between her parents. She brings up her mother and says, “my mother’s hand opens in her early grave and i hold it out like a good daughter” (6-7). This puts her directly in the middle of the two while also taking her mother’s side. In doing so, she is calling herself a “good daughter.” Her mother had clearly died still waiting to receive money as well as other things from her ex-husband and as her daughter, she decided that in order to be considered a good daughter she needed to step up and take charge. More specifically, the daughter is put in between her parents’ financial troubles when she says, “all week you have stood in my dreams/ like a ghost, asking for more time/ but today is payday, pay day old man” (3-5). She uses these words to describe her father with a negative connotation saying that he is standing there pale-faced, short of his money. However, this use of the word ghost has a dual meaning here. It also shows that her father too has passed. By calling him old man it shows that after all of this time she is tired of hearing his excuse over and over again. 

Towards the middle of the poem the daughter continues takes her mother’s side of their divorce but still feels that she at fault within the situation. She says, “i wish you were rich so i could take it all/ and give the lady what she was due” (9-10). This is her telling her father she wishes she could take all of his money that he owes her mother and that he has in general so that she could give her mother absolutely everything. By doing it herself, she is directly within the divorce but also on her mother’s side. She is tired of her father not giving her mother what she is supposed to get. She continues with “you gave her all you had/ which was nothing. you have already given her/ all you had” (14-16). She is now focusing more on her anger towards her father. It is clear that her father did not give her mother what he was supposed to because he simply did not have the money. However, what he did give her was not enough. Here she is angry because of what he had done to her mother rather than what he had done wrong to her. Through everything with both herself and her mother, this continues to make her unhappy with him. 

In the end of the poem she changes her view and puts everything on her parents rather than herself. She even says, “you were each other’s bad bargain, not mine” (19). Here she is finally taking herself out of the situation and explaining that her parents brought out the bad in each other. She questions why she is still in the middle of their divorce after all this time when she asks, “what am I doing here collecting?” (21). This is her realizing that her parents’ issues are irrelevant to her and that at the end it is not her fault. No matter how much she thought it might have been her fault in this past, she now knows that it is not and it has not been.  

There are many negative words that make it seem as if the daughter in this piece is angry at her father. For example, she is constantly calling him names. She says, “there will/ never be time enough daddy daddy old lecher/ old liar” (8-10). She begins by calling him “daddy” which shows that originally they had a good father-daughter relationship. However, she then switches over to this particular word “lecher” which refers to sexual desires, and “liar” which is someone who is dishonest. This brings up a mistrust and shows that the father had cheated on the mother. Since the daughter is uneasy about this she calls him these names. As the poem continues she calls him names like “old pauper,” “old prisoner,” and “old dead man” (20). Through the negative words that the author chooses to use, it clearly shows how poorly the daughter thinks of her father. 

Throughout this piece Lucille Clifton uses imagery to show exactly what the daughter went through. When she calls her father a “ghost” it gives a vivid image of a pale, dead man who is begging for more time. This is also evident when she says that “my mother’s hand opens in her early grave and i hold it out like a good daughter” (7-8). This image of her dead mother in her grave still awaiting everything her ex-husband owes her is extremely intense. It helps to show that looking back she did feel as if she was in the middle of their whole relationship and that it was her fault. At the very end she is referring to her father and she says, “you lie side by side in debtors’ boxes/ and no accounting will open them up” (22-23). This is her final thought where she comes to the conclusion that her father is in his coffin in the ground and there is no amount of money now that is going to change what happened. 

Throughout this piece, Lucille Clifton was able to show that the daughter came to a realization that her parents’ problems were in the past, and she was no longer in the middle of them. She did this by using imagery and diction to create a piece which followed the daughter’s thoughts. In the end, it was evident that although she was angry and thought that their divorce was her fault, in the end she was not to blame. 
