What my father gave me

To have    To hold My father gave me our mother’s engagement ring quietly on my 18th birthday morning with the photograph she’d kept of Rupert Brooke, his floppy tie, good-looking face.   Dad gave me too my mother’s poetry in that notebook with a black and shiny cover, handwritten words to re-create a presence where her absence was the norm. – Lerys Byrnes   Silence   My father and I worked quietly together. We would take on the load    touch up the mask saying too little to each other.   So it was always from others                         that I heard his best stories....   like the man who said my father took three mice under his cap                                        on the first day of school...   and a friend's uncle   who told me that my father paid             his entry fees to churches in Jerusalem.   He was a Christian said my atheist father      alive with pleasure                                                             at the memory   eating his heart out in the Holy Land            sending all his army pay back to his wife.   So I had stories wove them into eulogy   wondered if it were praise enough for a quiet hero.   His photograph hangs in my study now   watching me write   sharing the silence.   – Flora Smith