From Him To Me

My father sits me down at the table

a deadly-serious look on his face.

He hands me a thin package,

a brown envelope

that looks older than I am.

 

I slide the item out of the paper,

and recognise the face immediately.

His hero and mine,

John Lennon.

Is this what I think it is?

A book of John Lennon’s poetry

from 1964.

 

He explains how he’s had

the book since the Sixties,

buying it as a teenager,

obsessed with the band,

and just as he’s passed

his love of the Beatles

on to me, he would

now like to pass on

this book, this artefact,

as treasured as

Shakespeare’s First Folio.

 

Are you happy? he asks,

as I flick carefully through the

sixty-year old pages,

lost for words.

I nod, smiling,

tears in my eyes.

His most treasured possession

has become mine.

 

My reason for valuing the

book as priceless

is different than his.

For me, the fact that my father

had the book for so long,

and is now handing it down to me,

gives it such significance.

 

For me, my father’s story is

the extra chapter,

the epilogue,

the missing last pages,

that the book was his,

that he has carried the volume

for over half a century.

 

I can’t find the words to

explain how special this is.

This book, for all these reasons,

should be handled with white gloves,

spoken over with hushed reverence,

and kept behind glass somewhere,

 

 

and so I’ll try to write a poem about it,

to try and capture just how much it means.

Perhaps sitting pen in hand,

trying to process it all,

maybe then the words will come,

and then,

maybe one day,

I’ll read it to him.