Underneath The Door

My father was a doctor, who would come home late at night With a soul so bruised and bleeding from his unending faithful fight To keep a hold of kindness in a world that isn’t kind To hold out the hope of healing to his hurting humankind And he’d flee back to his study, to his bookish quiet place With notes and books and journals, to all in his special space Then he’d lock the door from things that cannot be locked out And his youngest son would starve for what he would always do without But it was meant to make me who I am and for all these many years Till the little boy down on his knees full of hope and full of fear Calling underneath the door, “This is me, it’s who I am” For we love the best by listening, when we try to understand Desperate stubby fingers pushing pictures neath the door And longing to be listened to, by the man that I adored Inside someone who needed me just as much as I did him Still unable to unlock the door that stayed closed inside of him And it’s strange the way we tend to flee from what we need the most That a father would lock out his son when his heart would hold him close But our wounds are part of who we are and there’s nothing left to chance And pain’s the pen that writes the songs and they call us forth to dance