Max,
I particularly like the final dozen lines, incorporating human words like 'shouldering' with ironic connotations of all that lack of contact between the father and the speaker. I wonder whether, however, given that the son is replying to the father: 'Dad, you know I was overseas,' you would say 'Never a sportsman'. This line jars slightly because it seems addressed to the reader suddenly. All the rest of that information is designed for father to hear but he would know you were not a sportsman already wouldn't he? Or else he could be told that you never 'became' a sportsman (after he died).
The notion of the father's 'visit', in uniform, is very powerful and moving.
Bill
> On 7 May 2014, at 8:09 pm, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Lawn Bowls and Trophies
>
> Father, many decades dead,
> visited last night,
> stood at the foot of my bed;
> still just fifty-nine,
>
> not long retired,
> ready for the bowling club,
> trousers cream, shirt white;
> face tanned except where
>
> his spectacles perched,
> keen to be skipper
> at yet another tourney.
> Returned without a trophy,
>
> he'd be keen to say why,
> keen to be ready for next time,
> most likely with the same
> three mates of his chosen team.
>
> What would he say to me?
>
> 'Son, I guess you never all
> this time took up lawn bowls.
> What became of my set of four?
> you know how fine they were -
>
> polished, never scratched,
> packed in their leather satchel
> with their soft shammy
> safe from harm. No Kiwi
>
> bowler ever had a set
> better than mine. The length
> of the country, Northland
> to chilly Southland
>
> I'd led my team, done well
> also in the Singles' (wryly
> not winning selection
> for the host country
>
> in the Commonwealth Games).
> 'What became of my bowls?
> Not in the Austin's luggage-boot,
> still, when your mother sold it!?'
>
> 'Dad, you know I was overseas,
> missed your funeral, left
> every task to my grieving
> sister and our Mum.
>
> There wasn't much you left
> to be tidied up. Those bowls
> went to a player you liked
> for a price you'd have approved.
>
> Your silver trophies, tarnished
> badly, came later to me. I'd
> rather they had vanished.
> Never a sportsman, I did
>
> learn later in life why
> all that mattered to you -
> the skill, the concentration,
> rising to the occasion,
>
> the slow beers of the post-mortem;
> Mum and I waiting outside
> the Grosvenor in the Austin -
> she had shandy, I lemonade.'
>
> 'But - that day in the sixties
> I came downstairs for the team
> breakfast in that Northland
> hotel, and my heart stopped,
>
> that's where I'm stuck;
> and you, son, in Scotland,
> young then and half-estranged,
> or where you are now,
>
> looking back puzzled,
> ageing yet - as I never did.'
> Father, I see you still
> gaze fixed on your last bowl
>
> slowing on the green
> completing its last curve
> near its goal
> with a toppling swerve
>
> almost there, shouldering
> aside your opponent's bowl;
> you tiptoeing forward
> behind it, shammy in hand
>
> gesturing it towards
> triumph at the far end.
>
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