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.

A Poem for My Children, by Adrian G R Scott

I am not sure how well
I fathered you; only
you can tell, and I
am scared to ask.

As you grew
we played the hide
and seek of spring,
tucking you to bed
I glimpsed gloom
and glow in your dreams,
and we voyaged the seas
of juvenescence that
are always sailed before
the maps can be made.

At Christmas I was
Santa, you mistook
me for the crimson king,
kissing me with innocent
lips, eyes shining before
the Herod of adulthood
carried off your infancy.

I waged the grown-up war
only to make you casualties.
For that and many other failings
as a father, je suis désolé. 

In recompense and to offset
my faults, I want you to
know how the world has
made itself known to me.

Life will not present itself
to you like low-hanging
fruit in easy orchards.
Sadly others will get
the applause as you stand
in the wings and watch,
but trust me, plaudits
are a masquerade.

Your life is within,
a fine filament
that arises in your
given soul. This is the
place the great tales
speak of; where
the tenderness of your
regrets will beckon
to a desperate crossing
and a dark doorway.

Then you,
like Theseus,
will find that to face a
minotaur you follow
that glimmering strand
to the wounded bird
of your vulnerability
laying between his
subtle hooves.

In that meeting
the monster will
be your teacher,
unveiling in you
the unquenchable
font of life.

Then you will never
have to ask a stranger
to tell you who you are;
you will have stepped
onto your spot-lit mark,
and the soft memory
of my voice will
be your prompt. 

From The Call of the Unwritten, Adrian G R Scott, ISBN 978-1-4461-3806-9.