On the evening of Father's Day I am remembering my own Daddy, Billy Wetherill, who died when I was nine years old when my life changed radically. But he still remains lodged near my heart two generations later. I wrote this poem about him and published it in my collection With Such Caution. You might like it.
4 Billy: A Daughter’s Tale
We
walked along, your giant’s hand in mine, long fingers poking inside
my hand-knitted sleeve.
Remember
the nights she left the house for work?
You
sat and read the paper as I scaled your knee
settling,
birdlike, into that rustling space.
Remember
how we cut out pictures
and
pasted them into the Panjandrum book?
Remember
how you read us stories -
your
voice going up and down
like
the waves of the sea?
So
very sorry you don’t know my youngest –
like
you he’s highly numerate - you
did
not see him standing tall for Tai Kwan Do
(white
clad and obliquely oriental)
or
cricket-ready, complete with pads
and helmet
and faceguard protection.
It’s a
lifetime since I passed your dying age
of
thirty seven,. And now I contemplate
how
very young you were when
you
abandoned your life and mine,
when -
to my nine-year self - you seemed eternal.
It has
taken two generations
between
then and now for me
to
ventilate the retrospective pain
of
losing you too soon.
My
father died when I was nine and I see now that our relationship was the
template for my whole life.
On Amazon: http://tiny.cc/awpsuz
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