'Dad' by Sarah Rice | States of Poetry ACT - Series One
We would sit on the wings of his knees
and see-saw our way through stories
magical suitcases
Romanian folktales
golden apples
and sea voyages
Sister and I
bookended
holding each square corner
and turning the pages
Sometimes it was pontoon
betting with matchsticks and forgetting
to hold the plastic cards out of sight
in our keen bending over the game
The tooth-cleaning song
upstairs and downstairs
and always ending with pie
Gathering leaves into high dry piles
with crinkly edges
in a navy roller-neck
Planting out and potting up
with rubber knee pads over the jeans
engaged in a small prayer service
to the row of terracotta pots laid out on the grass
and after offering fistfuls of potting mix to each
his large palms open on his knees
showed the black grains clinging along the creases
Unwrapping fish and chips from layers of grey grease paper
that the oil had already worked through
Singing Irish shanties
Scottish ditties
gold rush songs in the car
and walking hand-in-hand across the car-park
Playing squash together
the two of us in that odd white square
with old wooden rackets and older dunlops
the long reach of his hand letting him sit pretty in the centre
while I wove crazily about him in a mad maypole dance
of sweat and the rubber slap of shoe-soles
with the tiny ball greying but warming over time
til it was a hot coal burning in the palm each time it was retrieved
Still the love of paprika and garam masala
dukkah and kimchi
fennel seed
curry powder
turmeric
biting on the bitter seeds and smiling
palmfuls flung into the pan with abandon
and the remaining powder clapped away in proud applause
And a very cold night in a tent to see Halley's comet
which I never saw
but swore I did with nods and ahs
when he pointed and held the binoculars for me
despite the fog-smudged sky
and over-night involved a mid-sleep trip
to the concrete toilet-block together in the blackness
and an impromptu run around the cold field
to warm ourselves in the strange emptiness
And parties where
after egg and spoon
the orange wheelbarrow was filled with more than sister and me
more even than all our small friends put together
We would clasp the plastic rim
and it would buckle and tilt on a crazy angle
but he always got the big wheel turning
could always lift us
push us round the garden
no matter how many
how heavy.
Sarah Rice
Recording
'Dad' begins at 3:09