My Father's Love Letters

In “My Father’s Love Letters,” Komunyakaa juxtaposes the gritty setting of a “toolshed” (Line 25) with the tenderness of the terms of endearment in the love letters the speaker writes on behalf of his father, filled with words such as “Love, / Baby, Honey, Please” (Lines 17-18). Though the speaker believes that his father genuinely “[l]abor[s] over” (Line 35) these words, the “quiet brutality / Of voltage meters & pipe threaders” (Lines 24-25) that surround his father say otherwise. By contrasting the father and the son’s external and internal experiences, Komunyakaa suggests that no matter how hard the speaker’s father tries to win back the mother, he will never be as successful a husband as he is a carpenter who can “look at blueprints / & say how many bricks / Formed each wall” (Lines 29-31).

This physical setting appears even bleaker in comparison to the poem’s references to the natural world, which also carry a sense of melancholy. Though the speaker does not reveal the speaker’s mother’s whereabouts, he does explain that she “sent postcards of desert flowers / Taller than men” (Lines 4-5). The reader may assume that she is in a desert environment when she writes the postcards, perhaps in the American Southwest, where the arid climate suggests a lack of vitality.