Exactly a year ago today at 3.15pm, I was on the Ferry to Larne, going home to visit my sick mother, when I received a call to say that she had passed away.
How to tell the children, who looked at me knowing the news was not good?
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Sometimes I unexpectedly see
My long-dead Father
When I am fiddling.
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He looks
With round face and clear
Dark eyes,
Smiling with a gummy grin.
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My Grandfather is listed in the 1911 census of Northern Ireland as a Cabinet Maker. James Black. A Catholic. From Ballycastle. When the R. M. S. Titanic was being built he, like thousands of others went and found work at Harland and Wolff.
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Against the back fence
In the pouring rain
My Father’s bike.
The ‘Raleigh All-Steel’
Two flat tyres.
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Raymond Carver – the American short story writer and poet published a book in 1985 called “Fires”. It is a great collection of essays and poems. Included in the book is a wonderful and moving essay called, “My Father’s Life” and a poem entitled, “Photograph Of My Father In His Twenty Second Year.” He says, “The poem was a way of trying to connect with him” long after he had died.
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