I arrived in Lhasa by train in freezing weather.
From what I’d heard, my father would be there.
Outside the gaping entrance all was dark,snow
falling quietly like owls’ feathers.
In the bustling concourse, doubling as a market,
just as I’d feared, my errant father
was nowhere to be seen.
I knew he was dead but that didn’t seem
a proper excuse. I had in my pocket
a bronze coin he’d given me from the reign
of Tasciovanus, and his last letter
telling me, while in Dublin, to visit
and give his love to his old friend Joe Bewley
‘who ran a marvellous place on Grafton Street
where they made jam and sold fine coffee and tea’.
BEWLEY’S ORIENTAL CAFE, he’d scrawled in capitals.
Then I saw him in his shining army cap,
sober, younger than ever, bigger and taller than me.
Resentment ebbed as I found myself wrapped
in the warmth of his bone-cricking, bearlike embrace.
[From: Drypoint (Faber & Faber, 2024)]
