Fatherless Child

Once, in the summer grass,
he'd laboured to rouse me.
His transistor caroused
my innocent ears with tunes
blown through, hot, across
from Radio Luxembourg.
I didn't join the dots,
when he came.
My outline changed, my belly
filled in, like it was painted by numbers
with his swift, intuitive strokes.
When my pains came,
he was long gone, like the song–

the one I hadn't heard
about high aprons and boys walking by.

He's never seen his daughter, though
she has his almond eyes. And they wander
wide over all these years. Searching.

She cries to know him.
All I can give her to explain,
to ease the pain, is this tape
without a player. Musical score
strung out for her story. It fell
on the mat, wrapped in grass-green
silk, the day she turned eighteen,
her spooled inheritance.
Sender: No Address.