Father's Day

A poem for all your Dads, and mine.

Not ham, not glam,
not known for art, rakish hats
or flights of fancy,
you never heard of bliss;
but laboured so that nothing was amiss.

Not monied nor on show,
more treated with a slight contempt.
Not feminist, nor male chauvinist pig
but steady in the small and in the big.

Paid bills on time,
gave money to the poor,
held the looming crisis to your chest.
Put everyone to bed
then sat and wept,
knowing that your promises were kept.
Never left the job that clipped your wings
although your heart imagined better things;
you knew that all kites needed strings.

So here's a toast to you
whose life goes on without remark,
to you who mind the shop
while others' arrows arc
to greater glory and renown,
to lives of glitter and of pop,
to lives of up, not down.

For you create the space
and then the space creates.
What you've become is soil,
soil in which short grass and tall tree grow.
You've become the ground you held;
you did not let it go.

Copyright Peter Neary-Chaplin 2019. All rights reserved.