My dad was a prince, who was painfully poor.
Creditors crept and kept knocking his door.
He hid underground, freeing coal from its seams.
My dad was a miner, a dreamer of dreams.
My dad was a singer; he played the guitar.
(When not up the bookies, or down the Casbah)
He’d jam with his cousin; they\'d started a band.
They’d cut their first single, dad called it, ‘Dreamland!’
My mum was a maiden, from Mercia she hailed.
A beautiful princess, voluptuously veiled.
She laughed when they named her: a mother to be.
At last, from that sweatshop, she’d soon be set free!
My mum and dad married, their loving bore fruit.
My dad, he seemed stoic dressed up in a suit.
My mum, she seemed sassy, all wayward and wild.
Her heart though was warming with love for her child.
My dad and mum raised me like one of their own,
a peace-loving poet they wanted to clone.
A child of their dreaming who’d work and get wed,
compose them love sonnets for when they were dead.
My dad died, one summer, at age thirty-nine.
Last eyes to clap on him, I think they were mine:
the child of his dreaming, who\'d started to see
his dying was making a poet of me!
My mum went on breathing when dad’s breath had fled.
She wept, like a widow, alone in her bed.
Dad’s dream, like her dreamer, to spite her, had died.
A cross now she carried: “I’m coping,” she lied.