Lucille Clifton is an award - winning author and a teacher of poetry at a number of colleges and universities, and she is still writing today. In her poem “forgiving my father” she talks about forgiveness of a sin too large to think about. Her poem is about a person who has lost both of his parents to death. The narrator in the poem is all alone, both of his parents are now dead “you lie side by side in debtors boxes”(Clifton 271). The narrator is left alone, unloved, and uncared for. Also by the tone of the the poem the reader can tell that the speaker was not loved and cared for after the mother died. As the speaker refers to the father as “daddy old pauper old prisoner, old dead man”(Clifton 271). The reaction to the disease of loneliness