Watching World in Action With My Dad

I never knew he could fry a chop,
I’d only ever seen him pour bacon fat
over lacy eggs turning their yellow caps
milky white. We sat together watching
wars unfold; it didn’t matter that my mind
hadn’t mapped the territory, I saw
the girl running down the road.

Young days seem long, things happen;
in less than a decade he’d gone but
every milestone since has been marked
by images and conversations I shared
with him. And now my brother, whose mind
has crumpled, tells the clipboard lady
that he worked in the Ambulance Room
at the pit. But he didn’t, that was our Dad.

Janet Dean was born in Barnsley and lives in York. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, commended in The Poetry Society Stanza competition and featured in the Northern Poetry Library’s Poem of the North. Her poems have been published by Valley Press, Templar, Paper Swans, Strix, The Morning Star, among others. She writes fiction as Janet Dean Knight, her debut historical novel The Peacemaker, set in Yorkshire mining communities, was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Prize in 2017 and published in 2019 by Top Hat Books.