Yesterday I was reading up on fathers, in preparation for the sermon I’ll give for Father’s Day, this Sunday. I ran into too many sentimental stereotypes about fathers. I got sick of all the rhetoric around fatherhood and responsibility and family values. I got tired of the usual worn religious cliches about fathers and father-gods that have only a tangential relationship to the real live fathers I know. I made the mistake of rereading the story in Genesis where God tells Abraham to sacrifice Abraham’s son Isaac, which only served to raise my blood pressure.

Then I remembered the second section of Robert Kroetsch’s long poem “Seed Catalog,” a section which seems to me to break away from lots of the stereotypes about fathers; probably because it’s a documentary poem which presents a more-or-less accurate portrait of a real man. Concrete rather than abstract. It’s an odd text for a sermon, but sometimes you have to take your religious sources where you can find them….

My father was mad at the badger: the badger was digging holes in the potato patch, threatening man and beast with broken limbs (I quote). My father took the double-barreled shotgun out into the potato patch and waited.

Every time the badger stood up, it looked like a little man, come out of the ground. Why, my father asked himself — Why would so fine a fellow live below the ground? Just for the cool of the roots? The solace of dark tunnels? The blood of gophers?

My father couldn’t shoot the badger. He uncocked the shotgun, came back into the house in time for breakfast. The badger dug another hole. My father got mad again. They carried on like that all summer.

Love is an amplification
by doing/ over and over.

Love is a standing up
to the loaded gun.

Love is a burrowing.

One morning my father actually shot at the badger. He killed a magpie that was pecking away at a horse turd about fifty feet beyond and to the right of the spot where the badger had been standing.

A week later my father told the story again. In that version he intended to hit the magpie. Magpies, he explained, are a nuisance. They eat robin’s eggs. They’re harder to kill than snakes, jumping around the way they do, nothing but feathers.

Just call me sure-shot,
my father added.