Called, I entered
‘The Departure Lounge’
renamed, a rare-shared joke,
for that downstairs room;
here my father sobbed
with cancer’s slow burn.
Sat upright, explaining a dream,
for the first time in our lives,
(me, twenty-something,
then, no reader of such things),
with his simple review:
‘I saw my mother,’ he explained.
Nan had passed on ten years before.
‘She said.. everything is easy, there is no difficulty..’
In that moment, with his head-held,
Dad licensed me to cry before my kids,
to find comfort in dreams,
and to speak with the dead.