A week before Mom’s passing, I asked her about what is perhaps my favorite poem, “The King My Father.”

At that point, her ability to speak had lessened greatly. Parkinson’s had cruelly robbed her of simple conversation. She regressed from struggling to remember a specific word to the point that she’d start a sentence but would stop after two or three words.

And so when I asked her for the backstory about her poem “The King My Father,” my own father paused for a bit and then gently suggested, “Joanie, you wrote that about your dad, didn’t you?”

Mom was too close to sleep to respond. Within days, a stroke would end her ability to tell me that one last story.

The King My Father

The king my father
With three bright hounds
Rode out one evening
By bugle bounds.

He went in evening;
The sky was red.
He left my mother
Alone in bed.

The tame cock warned him;
His steed reared high,
But the king my father
Rode out to die.

The sky-flame shimmered
And burned to black.
The tame cock shuddered;
The hounds turned back.

The queen my mother
Went from her bed
To fit a mourning
Cap to her head.

O, in the morning
By bugle bound
A royal and riderless
Horse was found

And no hounds frolic
And no cocks cry
Since the king my father
Rode out to die.
~ Joan Cassidy 1952

Grandpa was a policeman on the streets of New Haven, Connecticut, starting in the 1920s. Francis Raymond Cassidy, Sr. followed in his own father’s footsteps. Great-grandpa Patrick Cassidy served as a policeman in Dublin, Ireland until 1890, when he immigrated to the U.S.

Mom wrote “The King My Father” in 1952. She graduated college that year. And married Dad. The year 1952 was also when Grandpa retired from the force.

He lived to be nearly 82 and we miss him to this day.

Thinking of Mom as a little girl, frightened as her beloved father headed off to work with a badge on his chest and a gun in his hand, brings tears to my eyes. Mom was the oldest child. First-born children must be brave.

And brave she was. Her fears were finally released, years later, as they blossomed into verse.

“The King My Father” © 1952 Joan Cassidy Vayo. All rights reserved.

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