Full fathom five thy father lies
It’s March, but the pond lip’s bare
that was full of them when, as a kid,
I’d lie, eyeing their gelid stare,
trying to fathom that insistence within
whose hidden spell would breach
both egg and air, corralling those untold
pearls against a new world’s shell.
Older-boned, but fatherhood’s been nothing more
than that time when our precautions tore
and we bunked off college for the family doctor’s
discretion to quell what I hear hourly now –
years since our fading morning after fears –
those changes rung whose knells we might’ve
suffered into something rich and strange.
“Being childless is similar to being an atheist: both are the right decision for me and I’m comfortable with them. However, one leaves a child-shaped and the other a god-shaped hole in life which I’ve tried to explore. This poem, based round the words of Ariel’s song in The Tempest celebrating the transformative change undergone by a dead father, explores the transformative stalling of a potential child by a living ‘father’. Either having or not having children can alchemise choice into both treasures and ghosts.”
Craig Dobson has had poems published in Acumen, Agenda, Butcher’s Dog, Crannóg, The Dark Horse, The Frogmore Papers, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Interpreter’s House, The Literary Hatchet, The London Magazine, Magma, Neon, New Welsh Review, The North, Pennine Platform, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Prole, The Rialto, Stand, Southword, THINK and Under The Radar.