Father

It's Sunday as I write and today, as on many days, I think about my father. Perhaps it's because the day is sombre: Highland Perthshire is quiet - almost as if the birds themselves know it's a Sunday. The leaves are beginning to turn from their summer green and the rowan berries are in bright clutches outside my study window. I have just returned from the mad rush of southern Germany to all this quiet, and it is made more evident in the wake of such constant noise.

I didn't really have a great relationship with my father - not until after he was gone. When I was a young boy we kept missing each other; that's how I like to describe it now. By that I mean that the things we said and wanted to say kept on being misunderstood, misheard. Afterwards I thought it was almost as if we were somehow standing talking and not quite hearing what the other said. And then he was suddenly gone. I had grown up with older parents, and I was blessed to have him so long.

It was only after his death that I began to write poems for him, about him, about us. I never imagined that such poems would come to the pen (and that is the great thing about poems, you can't know truly predict them ahead of time). Perhaps my subconscious was working through some of the things that weren't dealt with on this side. All I know is that they brought comfort, and even understanding. When I think of him now I see him laughing, with a face full of laughter. Not mocking, just happy.

This poem, from my collection 'Coracle', is one of the last of such pieces to be written.


A Kind of Coming Back

Sometimes I imagine the phone ringing in the night -
That worst of all nightmares - and staggering out
Into the darkness of the hall. My small voice
Asking the question - afraid, white, far away -
My father answering, ten years dead, as though
Nothing at all had happened. Asking me how I am
As in the old days, when I came home from university,
When he put down his pen in the study and turned
That half-smile on his face. I'm fine
I whisper now, ghostly, into the nothingness of the night -
Knowing this cannot be, this is impossible.
I'm glad, he says, serious at last, as though he means it,
And puts the phone down, leaving the humming nothing
Of that no man's land between the worlds.