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DAD
My
father hugged the hod
that
tore his ear.
Tiles
up to tilers. Brickie.
The
penniless thirties.
A
man’s man. Hands like
shovels.
He
graduated, laid,
course
upon course, the skins
of
homes. Nailed slates.
Lorried
from St Lazaire
in
the war to Lille.
A
horse corpse for shelter
on
Dunkirk’s escape beach.
Angry,
half Irish. Pay-day
a
weekly rage-bout.
Bastard.
Half something else.
False
grit. Sober.
Mythic
and bloody well
all
too human, shouting.
Struck
my mother and me.
I
hated him.
But
he laboured, riveter.
His
wages, hers, got me
taught
to sixteen.
French.
Mathematics.
Ignorant,
pigheaded,
hurting
like hell
that
I despised him and
did
college despite him.
It
took decades, mother’s death,
drunken
loneliness,
for
the wound between us to seal.
I
a father. He our guest
then.
Ignorant,
thankful, with
his
hod and Dunkirk tales.
Love
seeped between.
I
the hard one.
We
took him out,
drove
him round
the
changed familiar streets
where
they’d torn down his homes.
How
much can a man take?
Testicle
cancer,
wife
gone, sons done well,
condescending
bastards.
Miss
him. Talk to his ghost.
Takes
two lives for one life to mature.
I
told the priest to say
he
worked hard. By Christ he
did.
Alan
Marshfield
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