Father’s Day

First draft, while the spirit moves.

Father’s Day.

How did you stop being mine, dad?

How did you walk out the door?

Did I see you do it, dad?

I can’t remember anymore.

Time’s passed.

I know only that you left, dad,

When I was some ten years old

And I’d have given anything to keep you, dad,

I’d have promised to be good as gold.

But the chance passed.

I know my mother was a pain, dad,

She remained a pain to me,

But I, the child, could not escape,

Couldn’t walk out the door and go free,

Til her death freed me at last.

I had to listen to her words, dad,

Had to learn how she blamed me,

For she’d sent you away, she would often say,

Because you didn’t love me

As you should.

No vitriol with that assertion,

Though she had enough and to spare,

And some of it you might have spared me,

If only you’d been there.

But you weren’t.

What kind of bad must I have been, dad,

That you could not love your first born?

And being so bad as I must have been

What wonder that God had foresworn

To love me?

I believed then, as a child believes,

And I grieved then, as a child alone grieves,

My path obscured by autumn leaves

Whate’er the season.

A darkness in me.

Half a century ago you disappeared,

Vanished, it transpires, in sunnier climes,

Had another son, a daughter too,

And, no doubt, some lovely times,

But I did not.

For half a century I missed you,

Felt an aching absence in my heart,

Missed your words, your looks, your thoughts,

And it broke me apart

Forever.

Believing in no God, no Heaven,

I know we will not meet again,

That the man who died three thousand miles away

Has left me, till my death day, in the grip of pain

Forever.

One conviction only, did you – in leaving – leave me,

Which is that it’s okay to not stay,

That it’s okay when you are under pressure

Simply to walk away,

And I have tried.

The night that others dread

Is naught but peace to me,

The silent darkness of the dead,

Offers naught but ease to me.

Yet I can’t get there.

Too many depend

For me to seek the easy end,

And all my life I now must spend

Missing you.

Why did you leave me, daddy?