Your skin alabaster cold now

Calluses of decades of heavy work

Lumped togetther with the bruised blood pooling

Around my father's dead eyes.

Oh! I love this orphan of the 1930s

More than words can say. His tortured

Childhood marked out in the myriad

Of white scars that pepper his back.

His life as an able seaman, sailing to Burma

When he was still a teen, sunk three times

In the North Atlantic. In the end he was just  glad to be

a family man who sought to help anyone he could.