Tug Dumbly # 67 - Father Faith

Father Faith*

Eyes shut tight against sunlight

you get those motes

and Meccano bits

protozoa sinking

in a primal soup gone cold.

Or like birds just hit a window

sliding, cartoon style, down the

red screen of the inner eye.

That’s one version.  

Another:

soon as he entered church

sidled into the pew and sat

my father squeezed his eyes tight shut.

I mean really squeezed

and pinched his nose

like he was taking a crap.

But I knew he was squeezing meaning

from god

or trying to squeeze god into meaning

like washing through a mangle.  

His prayer was brief but intense.  

Like the harder he squeezed

the better the odds of being received.

At the same time there was no point

banging on – 

you got heard the first time or not at all.    

                                                                                 

I think now of the Little Tailor

in the Brothers Grimm

pretending a piece of cheese

in his fist was a rock

and squeezing water from it

to scare away a giant.  

I don’t want to sell him short

or trample his mystery.  

But I don’t think he felt any

pressing need for redemption

or banked on anything much

beyond the self-salvation

of sweat and hard yakka.  

Still, he suffered for his lack of faith –

all those Sundays squandered

butchering Charles Wesley

when he might have been hosing leaves

from the gutter.  

His shy, scrunched up prayers

so far removed from the wrung-dry pieties

of those cat-arsed Christmongers

had something of the kid

awkwardly aping his elders,

like the bad pantomime

of me and my sister swearing  

and sucking coral tree petals

pretending they were smokes.

In any case my father took

the utilitarian approach

attacked faith with a mattock

just hoved on in like it was

any other piece of work to be got through.

Whether invoicing god

or shouldering a sack of spuds

it was don’t muck round, get stuck in

it’s not bloody flower arranging.    

His belief in action was miraculous

his moral fibre spliced tight

to his provider’s spine, the rod

and staff of his Proddy work ethic.

It was just the hoodoo part of the equation

the communing with the spook bit, he lacked.

He once told me going to church

made him ‘feel clean’.

I don’t know what prompted it.

It was uncharacteristic, which is why it sticks.

Expansive, for him,

beyond the tight orbit of the domestic,

touching the mystic.

  

* This poem will appear in my debut book of poems, Son Songs, coming out next week through Flying Islands Press. I'll be sticking up some poems from the book over the next little while, with details on availability to follow.  Needless to say it should be available where all good poetry is sold. Failing that, try my Facebook page, or tugdumbly@gmail.com