The poem of the day is Sherman Alexie's "How to Create an Agnostic"

This poem from Sherman Alexie's "Face" (Hanging Loose Press, 159 pp., $28 hardcover, $18 paperback, www.hangingloosepress.com) is modest in scope yet big in its focus on father-son dynamics, as it raises the question: How long before a parent's godlike status is shattered by a child's perceptivity? Note the way the final rhymes nicely underscore the dad's anticipation of his own dethronement. This is just one of a number of poems about parent-child relations in the Seattle writer's new book.

Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times arts writer

"How to Create an Agnostic"

Singing with my son, I clapped my hands

Just as lightning struck.

It was dumb luck,

But my son, in awe, thought

That I'd created the electricity.

He asked, "Dad, how'd you do that?"

Before I could answer, thunder shook the house

And set off neighborhood car alarms.

I thought that my son, always in love with me,

Might fall to his knees with adoration.

"Dad," he said. "Can you burn

down that tree outside my window?

The one that looks like a giant owl?"

O, my little disciple, my one-boy choir,

I can't do that because your father,

Your half-assed messiah, is afraid of fire.

— Sherman Alexie