Kamikaze

• Her father embarked at sunrise with a flask of water,
•  a samurai sword in the cockpit,
•  a shaven head full of powerful incantations
• and enough fuel for a one-way journey into history
• but half way there, she thought, recounting it later to her children,
•  he must have looked far down

  at the little fishing boats
•  strung out like bunting on a green-blue translucent sea
• and beneath them, arcing in swathes
•  like a huge flag waved first one way
•  then the other in a figure of eight,
• the dark shoals of fishes flashing silver as their bellies swivelled towards the sun
• and remembered how he and his brothers waiting on the shore
• built cairns of pearl-grey pebbles
• to see whose withstood longest
• the turbulent inrush of breakers
• bringing their father's boat safe
• yes, grandfather's boat - safe to the shore, salt-sodden,
• awash with cloud-marked mackerel, black crabs, feathery prawns,
•  the loose silver of whitebait
•  and once a tuna, the dark prince, muscular, dangerous.
• And though he came back my mother never spoke again in his presence
• nor did she meet his eyes and the neighbours too,
•  they treated him as though he no longer existed,
•  only we children still chattered and laughed
• till gradually we too learned to be silent,
•  to live as though he had never returned,
•  that this was no longer the father we loved.
• And sometimes, she said, he must have wondered which had been the better way to die.