Breaking My Father

I would be hard pushed to recall the details

of last week or even the events of yesterday

but I can tell you that I was five years old

and it was seven o’clock on a Thursday evening

when I broke my father.

My mother was out,

we were alone and it was given that each week

on this day I was allowed to stay up

an extra half hour to watch Top of the Pops –

but he decided that this should not be so, I should

go to bed, and maybe I was not yet thickened

in the smear of battery or too young to cow

to his threats but either way I refused, I clenched

my fists and yelled for my life as he dragged me

upstairs and when we reached my bedroom I would not

go in, no I would not do as he said.

Suddenly he dropped

to his knees before me, his face a broken window

and I see him, I still see him reach out blindly,

penitent, as though greeting the longed-for dead, pulling

me to him and holding me tight, both of us

toppling to the ground as if bound by rope

and him sobbing and sobbing. I remember thinking

that I was too hot and couldn’t breathe,

but he just held on tight

saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

There is no other time

in my life that he did this, this act of extravagant

penance, submitting, revealing tenderness.

And perhaps this was the difference between us,

the reason he passed on the dark cup of abuse

and I did not – my father had never witnessed the splinter

in his assaulter’s mask, a break in the fire

to tell him there was something human there,

that there was merely a man behind all that hatred,

all that fear, just a man, a man full of need

to be broken by a child.