Crashing The Hill (For Scarlett)

One day Daddy (the man in Mummy’s bed) on his way home from school of darling daughters once perched the prettiest little bird on the cross bar of his bicycle as they flew in fusion a confusion of darling Daddy & daughter down Dobbins’s Biddy’s Hill time whistling through their curly hair the thrill of wind & speed suddenly crashing to a halt greeting the telegraph pole out side Sheean’s the shoemender’s shop as if a comma had become a full stop. Carted off to hospital by an hysterical ambulance as the little girl ran all the way home clasping all the terror in her tight little hand nothing not even a grazed knee to show for all the drama to tell her Mummy that her Daddy “...was after crashing the hill on a bicycle to hospital! ” My mother worrying the day to death but he could be visited so I visited him in Ward No.7 where people not well lived in bed & prayed to get better me searching all over for the familiar smile that set fire to my imaginations but Daddy was a mummy all bandages & groans & in my nervousness I gulped down all the grapes I had bought for his recovery but he moaned that it was OK so I devoured everything in my fear. Here now in his great old age the scar still laughs across his cheek as somewhere inside him the memory lives on & on of him crashing the hill.