DAD BAG

I wait in line

At airport security

Behind a hairy woman

Who frets over boot buckles

As two kids hang from her freckled arms

She is practised

Unlike the neophyte behind me

Smiling before his ordeal

Beerily benign

Within all this enforced authority

The youth does not care

He is on his way home from oblivion

And is not prepared

I watch a border guard

As my sundries trundle through

The x ray machine

She’s an old mother 

In her fifties and candled onto that seat

A grey seen it all head

And her body has soaked enough venom and produced enough puke

There are not to be any shocks

Nothing but the little incidents to take home and report

No more adventure for her

But intrigued

By the image of my bag

She had to ask

What’s inside? Open it!

It is only my dad

Now in a brown plastic urn

With a tatty bit of paper stuck on

To tell the date of death and such

The details

For that’s all he is

And she knows

She lets me go with good luck

 I walk through the white lights

Sick of duty free

Into arrivals

There are families with tears

And strain on their cheeks

Some expect presents

Some yawn

There are guys with suits and signs

They look at us

But we have no one to meet

Only a hole to fill