From “my father moved through dooms of love”

Today, Father's Day, let's celebrate the fathers, father figures, partners and men that we love. Poet ee cummings wrote "my father moved through dooms of love" as an elegy to his own father. Like most of his work, it's complicated, beautiful, and full of syntactical experiments. Regarding the title, most take it to mean that cummings' father experienced love and sorrow in equal measure. Here is our favorite excerpt:

---

From "my father moved through dooms of love"

by ee cummings

his sorrow was as true as bread:

no liar looked him in the head;

if every friend became his foe

he'd laugh and build a world with snow.

My father moved through theys of we,

singing each new leaf out of each tree

(and every child was sure that spring

danced when she heard my father sing)

You can find the whole poem here.