How has becoming a parent — or being a caregiver — changed you? 

This is a poem of two halves. In the first half, a man questions God — how could a loving Father allow suffering to happen? And in the second half, the man becomes a father himself, filled with fear and love. His questions about fatherhood change; he’s no longer wondering about the beyond, he’s wondering about the right now.

Carlos Andrés Gómez is a Colombian American poet from New York City. “Father” appears in his debut full-length poetry collection Fractures, which was selected by Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the 2020 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Gómez has won the Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry and the Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize. His work has been published in New England Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.