Ken's Poetry

Your Father’s Sigh

Out of the pages he came
from forty years of yellow stain,
letters indelibly pencilled, black inked,
laboured by a hot and Latin hand.

Knowing now that she’s gone
the fires that had burned
between them then,
the subterfuge and risk they took
for passion and love’s sake
in a prying land;

knowing the lock of your hair
he held in his hand
that was blown away on a Welsh wind
foretold their love’s inescapable ending
when he left for his foreign land;

knowing from the cracking pages,
what unbelievably your mother never said
that you were born on the same date as he,
and all his life he must
on that happy day have
sighed a smile .. for you.