Red Doors

When I was a boy, red doors
were the exclusive domain of Lutheran churches
for reasons no one could explain
to a curious ten year old on a bicycle.

And then one day for reasons once again obscure,
my father painted our front door red,
a garish bright thing on our quiet house of secrets
and suddenly red doors sprouted like rectangular flowers,

no one caring whether we were Methodists
or Baptist or Jews, no, it was about something more primal,
a need for color, a desire to scream, in a suburban
perfect kind of way that we were not dead.

It was a fad, this red. By the next season
the doors began to slip back to their sanity,
one by one falling back to blacks and whites,
all save my father’s door, which remained red

until the day he died, the reasons, like so much of his life
a great secret, that this man who hated color and disturbance
painted his door red for forty years and left us at the end
with no reasons why.

About this poem

We are closing in on a year since my mother suddenly died. My father of course, died just this past January. Perhaps it is the timing, but they are both on my mind, so likely over the next couple of weeks, some verses starring one or the other will emerge.

They will be very different kinds of poems, depending on who I am writing about, as my mother, particularly late in life, was an open book, while my father kept many secrets until they were lost in his dementia tinged mind.

Tom