The title of the poem "Leaves," by Sam Hamod, seems
significant for several reasons.
In the first place,
imagery of leaves -- whether literal or metaphorical -- helps unify the poem, especially
since such imagery appears in all three sections. (There should be a space between lines
11 and 12 in the transcription above to indicate the break between sections 1 and 2.) In
the first section, the leaves are literally grape leaves which the speaker's father
picked before he died:
Tonight, Sally and I are making
stuffed
grape leaves, we get out a package, it’s
drying out, I’ve
been saving it in the freezer, it’s
one of the last things my father ever
picked in this
life . . .
(1-5).
These leaves provide
literal and figurative nourishment to the speaker. By eating the grape leaves, the
speaker in a sense ingests the spirit of his father, whom he obviously loves and whom he
just as obviously misses.
In the second section of the
poems, however, the leaves are metaphorical leaves -- the pieces of paper, including
letters, that survive from his father's life. Some of the father's writings are
inscribed on the leaves of "tablet paper" (15). The speaker ate the literal leaves, but
he gains a different kind of nourishment (emotional and spiritual) by reading his dead
father's writings.
Finally, in section 3, the leaves are
the leaves or pages of "the Arabic grammar book" (33) that the speaker might use to try
to come to a better understanding of his father's life, writings, language, and
culture. Perhaps the leaves here are also the figurative leaves of the poet's own
printed poems. In any case, the imagery of leaves helps unify the poem even as the poet
also rings various changes on this central idea.
One might
even consider the possibility that the poet is punning on another sense of "leaves,"
suggesting all the various things, both material and non-material, that his father has
left to him.
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