Fatherhood Quote by Karl Shapiro

Shapiro turns the body into a theological provocation, not a shrine. The opening question - "The body, what is it, Father" - reads like prayer that has swallowed a doubt and refuses to spit it out. Addressing "Father" invites the familiar Christian grammar of reverence, but the syntax keeps tugging toward argument: the body is "but a sign", not an end in itself. That little demotion does a lot of work. It drains the body of sentimental holiness while insisting it still matters, because signs point somewhere.

Where it points is strikingly kinetic: "love the force that grows us". Shapiro chooses "force" instead of "God", as if divinity is less a person than an engine - biological, providential, maybe even indifferent. That word carries modern unease: a 20th-century poet trying to reconcile flesh with faith after a century that made mass death feel industrial. Shapiro, a World War II-era voice, knew what bodies look like when history stops honoring them.

The final turn sharpens the edge: "to give back / What in Thy palm is senselessness and mud". It's an image of Genesis without the comfort. "Mud" echoes creation, mortality, and the humiliating fact of matter. "Senselessness" is the real heresy: it suggests the raw material in God's hand lacks inherent meaning until love - human love, enacted in the body - returns it as offering. The subtext is almost accusatory. If the body is merely clay, then the ethical task is to make it signify anyway: through intimacy, mercy, art, or sacrifice. Shapiro isn't asking permission to be flesh; he's demanding that flesh be taken seriously enough to count as praise.