A wee poem for my dad.

Every year (because I think it's on TV in the UK just about every year) I watch that superb film the Railway Children, and at the moment when Bobbie meets the train, I start to cry. I know why I'm crying, and I know too why every other woman I know, who loved her dad and lost him, also sheds a little tear at that precise moment. I've heard that many men are similarly affected and for much the same reason, by the movie Field of Dreams. But the Railway Children does it for me every time. And this year, I thought I would have to write a poem about it, and so I did.

DADDY MY
Dad, dead these fourteen years,
came to the door in a dream last night.
He still does this, a little less
often perhaps, but always
with a wee ache of normality.

I rushed through the room to
take his hand which
seemed oddly cool and small.
In life his hands were warm and
chipped and tinted with paint.
He was a dad who fixed things.

Waking I remembered how
the Railway Children makes me cry
with my incurable need to be Bobbie
in that daddy my daddy moment
meeting my own perfect train.

1 comment:

Maggie Craig said...

Catherine, a beautiful poem. You've made me cry for my own long-lost but never-to-be-forgotten Dad.

Maggie Craig