No, no writing yet. But a poem which I would be interested to see people’s interpretations of. My senior-year English teacher had an interpretation of this one that he was pretty certain of, but reading it again a year-and-a-half later, I’m not able to tease the same meaning out of these sparse lines.

My Papa’s Waltz
by Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

I’ll offer my teacher’s interpretation in a couple of days, after
everyone has had a chance to scratch their heads a bit and share their
own opinions.

Pesky Godson