Extracts from The Waistband and other poems

A Letter From My Father It's extant only on official forms - the wee coiled writing of my father. His copperplate chalked on corporation slate was lyric, legible, neat. On tax returns its furls and curlicues were daintier than Carolingian Miniscule. Yet he hated writing and many's the chit or docket I penned for him in the naive scrawl that prints these lines. Through all my journeyings, small triumphs and reverses I never had a note from him; whatever needed telling, he was more inclined to say. Slicing through the post these mornings how I crave a letter from my father, paternal greetings in a flawless script.

 

© Donny O'Rourke, 1997