Poem-A-Day: Only a Dad by Edgar Guest

October 12, 2013 Only a Dad by Edgar Guest     Only a dad with a tired face,  Coming home from the daily race,  Bringing little of gold or fame,  To show how well he has played the game,  But glad in his heart that his own rejoice  To see him come and to hear his voice.    Only a dad with a brood of four,  One of ten million men or more.  Plodding along in the daily strife,  Bearing the whips and the scorns of life,  With never a whimper of pain or hate,  For the sake of those who at home await.    Only a dad, neither rich nor proud,  Merely one of the surging crowd  Toiling, striving from day to day,  Facing whatever may come his way,  Silent, whenever the harsh condemn,  And bearing it all for the love of them.    Only a dad but he gives his all  To smooth the way for his children small,  Doing, with courage stern and grim,  The deeds that his father did for him.  This is the line that for him I pen:  Only a dad, but the best of men.          Today's poem is in the public domain.  About This Poem Guest has been called "the poet of the people." Most often his poems were fourteen lines long and presented a deeply sentimental view of everyday life. When his father died, Guest was forced to drop out of high school and work full time at the Detroit Free Press, eventually considering himself "a newspaper man who wrote verses." Of his poetry he said, "I take simple everyday things that happen to me and I figure it happens to a lot of other people and I make simple rhymes out of them."  Poetry by Guest Collected Works of Edgar A. Guest (BiblioLife, 2008)   Poem-A-Day Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-A-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Browse the Poem-A-Day Archive.   Edgar Guest, an English-born American poet, was born in 1881. In 1895, he was hired as a copy boy for the Detroit Free Press, where he would work for almost sixty-five years. In his lifetime, he published more than twenty volumes of poetry and was thought to have written over 11,000 poems. Guest died on August 5, 1959.   Related Poems Confessions: My Father, Hummingbirds, and Frantz Fanon by Benjamin Alire Sáenz In the Airport by Eleni Sikélianòs Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas __________________________ Love reading Poem-A-Day? Help support it today.     Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.

Forward this email This email was sent to prentice654.allsms@blogger.com by poetnews@poets.org |   Update Profile/Email Address | Instant removal with SafeUnsubscribe™ | Privacy Policy. Academy of American Poets | 75 Maiden Lane | Suite 901 | New York | NY | 10038