The foundation of a family breaks when there is a loose end.  If one member of a family does not deliver their part, all members struggle. This is very evident in the poem, Forgiving my Father by Lucille Clifton. Not everyone goes through the hardships Clifton has gone through.  She manifests these hardships through her poem, Forgiving My Father.  Through the extensive use of repetition and constant metaphor use she is able to use terms such as debt, payday, and other words relating to monetary value to reflect her personal conflict of how she deals with the abandonment committed by her father. These terms mainly relate to the emotional, and physical support of her father throughout her life.

Throughout the entirety of the poem Clifton consistently repeats the subject of payday, she does this to express the importance of what her father had done and how it had been a problem for years. This is evident when she states, “ today is payday, payday old man, my mother’s hand opens in her early grave and I hold it out like a good daughter” (Clifton 5-7).   From this example, Clifton portrays how her dad has clearly made them suffer and it is something that has been relevant for years because of the repetition expressed in this part of the poem. By repeating the word payday she generalizes the conflict to make it more obvious to the reader that she is being hurt by the acts of her father. By making it more obvious she is able to explain the severity of this situation by not saying anything at all. The words themselves can relate to the big picture that is represented by money but actually a metaphor for the inner struggle she faces.  

By giving his family nothing to offer, the father is gaining more debt every payday. Debt can be considered a metaphor within the big picture in order to emphasize the larger metaphor, which is overall monetary value.  Clifton lets the audience know this by referring to the topic of debt at the very end of the poem. She says, “ you lie side by side in debtors’ boxes and no accounting will open them” (Clifton 22-23). Meaning he has not been able to pay in so long that there is no way he can get out of the debt he has created for himself. With Clifton mentioning accounting she is saying that even with help nothing can change. She tried her hardest to forgive him but she knew he “would come up empty every friday” (Clifton 18). Coming up empty made her realize that forgiveness was not an option and the lack of forgiving ultimately made up the debt she referred to. This relates more to the inner emotional conflict of the situation where as the repetition in stanzas prior relates to her physical conflicts with her father. She would keep telling herself that he would soon change and be different, but deep on the inside she knew it was not true when every week he would not be there. 

In an act to generalize the conflicts Clifton has gone through she uses other terms related to money. This is because money is something everyone understands and it is important in the lives of a lot of people. When she uses these terms the topic becomes more broad and open to interpretations. For example, Clifton says “ I wish you were rich so I could take it all and give the lady what she was due” (Clifton 10-11). She does not mean physically rich, this is just another example of the metaphor used to generalize the topic of the poem. No one can understand what she has gone through and that is why she uses more relatable terms to get across the actual severity of her life with her father. She is getting the point across that her father owes her family a lot and they deserve it because of how much suffering they have to go through, but no one can relate to the suffering she has gone through unless they have felt it themselves and that is why the topic is generalized because people can relate to issues with money.

In its entirety, Forgiving my Father is a poem that uses words and terms related to monetary value to create a metaphor to generalize the poem as a whole. Clifton creates the metaphor of debt and payday to show how extreme the suffering is within her family. No one can truly understand the extent of her hardships and that is why she puts them in a much more generalized way. Repetition is another huge part in the poem to emphasize the dangerous amount of pain her and her family have gone through. By repeating the most important words related to the overall metaphor it becomes more clear how severe the problem actual and how much she has had to suffer. 
