The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Bill Van Buskirk serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2025.
LULLABY
Before our ears filled up with wax,
before we began to shadowbox
for the right to exist
in one another’s minds,
there was a song
that we could almost hear
that lingered in the closet,
with your hanging suits.
Last night, after twenty years,
it drifted out at me
like an old ghost riding
a whiff of camphor.
It was the hymn a young father hums,
surprised at the first of many deaths
endured for his sons.
You did not know the words,
just chose a tie,
slipped the knot against your throat
and crooned,
“It’s early boys,
go back to sleep.”
And we did.
For most of my life, my relationship to my father was characterized by admiration on the one hand (he was a champion athlete, running marathons into his sixties), and resentment on the other (He was often harsh and judgmental.) I’ve lately appreciated that I grew up in a world quite different than his. His childhood was blighted by the influenza epidemic (his mother died when he was four years old), the Great Depression, and a world war. Mine was a world where safety could be taken for granted, a sheltered world that he had largely built (but for which I never gave him credit). The gulf between us was almost unbridgeable—an exercise in “shadowboxing for the right to exist in one another’s minds.” Unfortunately, he died before we could talk about any of this.
Once I started writing poems, however, a different version of who he was began to show up. It was as if a great tenderness that he kept hidden emerged in the writing process. Or maybe it was that I did not want to carry a burden of resentment into old age. In any case, our “relationship” began to change as the poems emerged.
“Lullaby” is an account of one of my earliest memories. It emerged about twenty years after his death during a time when my siblings and I were helping my mother move out of the house where we grew up. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that house was about to become a place of memory and dream, whose roots went back to a time of innocence before the shadowboxing began.
I was cleaning out his closet which was just outside our bedroom. It was still redolent of mothballs (camphor) which triggered an image of a time when my brother and I were still quite little and he was our hero, as yet untouched by the corporate world that he was about to enter.
Bill Van Buskirk’s poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, The Paterson Literary Review, The Mad Poets’ Review and many others. His chapbook, Everything that’s Fragile is Important, received honorable mention in the Jesse Bryce Niles Chapbook contest sponsored by the Comstock Review (2007). His book, This Wild Joy that Thrills Outside the Law, won the Joie de vivre contest sponsored by the Mad Poets’ Review. (2010). His latest book is The Poet’s Pocket Guide to Steady Employment (2023).