My Papa's Waltz #10 (poem #7)

The whiskey on your breath   

Could make a small boy dizzy;   

But I hung on like death:   

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans   

Slid from the kitchen shelf;   

My mother’s countenance   

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist   

Was battered on one knuckle;   

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head   

With a palm caked hard by dirt,   

Then waltzed me off to bed   

Still clinging to your shirt.

So this poem is kind of strange, but it’s easy to analyze and follow because it’s actually a little more literal. So basically there’s this father, he seems to have had a lot of drinks down his system and he starts awkwardly drunk dancing with his son. And the thing that I love about this is that this is totally my grandpa, my grandfather is the father in this poem when he’s drunk. And the son who is also the one telling us the poem, he goes into depth about what his father is doing. He’s drunkenly dancing the night away with his son as he accidentally pushes pots and pans off the shelf to whom his wife is not too happy about that. But he goes further when he talks about how his father is a hard working man and has a couple of drinks just to relax. “ The hand that held my wrist   

Was battered on one knuckle”, this already gives us a clue that his father is a handy man (not a tool guy to be exact, but someone who does a lot of labor) so this guy doesn’t really have the right tools to commence the “chill out”, but he’s doing something. When he dances with his son, he’s so clumsy to the point that during the dance, his kid accidently scrapes his ear with his dad’s belt buckle. And that concludes the night. I feel like this  poem is important because it addresses a father/son relationship. Sort of how the dad is trying to reach out to his boy, but doesn’t really know how to, so the father aggressively prys into the son’s life. The boy sees that and has an appreciation for his father’s attempt on trying to relate to him, kind of letting his father know that his actions are not in vain and that he’s grateful for him as a dad.