First bite

My father retired almost deaf

after decades of fixing metal presses.

He took me to the factory one day as a kid.

He wasn’t ashamed of the work he did

to feed his family.

I was frightened by the violent clash of metal

but never let on.

He was in the metal workers union,

read their paper,

the Tele and the Mirror too

but had a healthy suspicion of the headlines.

He grew up in the dark terraces of East Sydney

and ran errands down Palmer Street

for women of the night as he called them.

He was a bastard, legally,

and my mother never let him forget it.

Ten years after the final mortgage payment,

the garage door wide open to the sun,

he drinks DA from a pony glass

he pinched from the Forest Inn,

puts on a silly smile and says

“Ah, that first bite!

Glass of amber fluid, son?”