Father's Love Letters

Poetry is unique in literary art in that it can portray any emotion and any tone. Even in a limited space, more emotion and meaning can be conveyed in a few poetic lines than some authors can convey in hundreds of pages. Yusef Komunyakaa's sad and depressing poem "My Father's Love Letters" is a prime example of the potential emotional strength that can be shown in a few lines. In Komunyakaa's fairly short piece, the young narrator of the poem explains to the reader about how his or her father tries to write a weekly series of love letters to a woman who has gone away, the child's mother. This particular poem is a type of narrative which functions to tell a story as well as to perform within the framework of a traditional poem, although it does not have either a uniform meter or any rhyming...
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