Grandfather of the One Armed Bandits

Sitting unsoberly at the rear
Of the Auld Shillelagh
I chance to ask about your father,
Dead before I was the
Slightest something
In your young man's eye -
Expecting to hear the
Stories I had heard before
And relished -
Knowing as I did
Had I been born a man,
Pre war, in Cleethorps town
Living behind pebble-dash
With cracked concrete for a lawn
The air of the pubs
Would have been my air,
I too would have market traded,
Chatting up the pale-faced wives
Of dock workers and soon to be dead
Service men. I would have
Dealt in slot machines,
One armed bandits for easy cash,
Ridden buses with a bellyful of
Whisky on a Friday night.
But the familiar stories
Are not forth coming,
Instead you say
'He died a terrible death'
And the Irish music stops
As you look to the door
'He had one regret' you mouth
A half drunk pint of
Guinness in your hand -
'That he never saw the Grand Canyon'.
And if I had been asked to guess
A million things he might have regretted
This would not have been one,
The Lincolnshire man raised on land
Flatter than a punctured tyre, never
Travelling further than the run
To Sussex where he tried to make a go
Of things, and failed, whose life
Was the simple song of work
And pub and women, of home and
His boys - my dad. But he dreamt of
Arizona it seems and the deep deep
Drop into the rocks of the
Colarado Plateau which years later
You stood at the edge of,
You tell me, a special side trip
From some business in LA,
And looking down saw it all
For yourself, and for him,
The great chasm in front of you
Filled with your father's name
And the sound of his distant ambition.