My Papa's Waltz

My Papa's Waltz

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.

-Theodore Roethke

My father was quite a light drinker, I never knew him to dance, and he worked a desk job. Still I've always liked this poem. 😉

But I was thinking about ballad meters and this came to mind. I might post some other ballad-y things in the near future.

Theodore Roethke was an American poet born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1908, who died in 1963. This is from his second book of poems, The Lost Son and Other Poems, of 1948. It's one of two poems of his that I used to have memorized (and might still if I thought about it).