Father
Fifty years since he died – that’s enough
to make cliffs crumble, tears
crystalize to salt and the noise
of storms and sunsets loosen
their hold on the mind. A playground
locked against a northern winter
imprisoned my grief, its swings
and seesaws clutched by invisible
fingers of ice. I missed his funeral
by a hemisphere, my last farewell
a quick embrace now petrified
to a gravestone by his river.
Grief doesn’t last, or shouldn’t. In its place
are memory, images, and love itself
should be sufficient memorial.
Andrew Taylor is the author of seventeen books of poetry, including Collected Poems (Salt, UK 2004), The unhaunting (Salt, UK 2009), and Impossible Preludes
(Margaret River Press, 2016). He has published much literary criticism, and written the libretti for two operas, as well as translating poetry from German and Italian. In 1975 he co-founded Adelaide’s Friendly Street Poets, Australia’s oldest
continuous public poetry reading, and later the South Australian Writers’ Centre.
He is Professor Emeritus at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia.
Since leaving Perth in 2014 he divides his time between Sydney and Wiesbaden
in Germany.
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