The Poem My Father Read at His Own Retirement
Forty years of work, and the poem he chose was about a Tuesday.
My father retired after forty years at the same factory, and the company gave him a watch and a plaque and a party in the canteen. He stood up to say a few words and he read a poem he had written himself, and the poem was about a Tuesday.
Not a special Tuesday. Not the day he was promoted, or the day the plant almost closed, or the day he met my mother. A Tuesday in March, twenty years ago, the kind of day that does not make the memory because it is too ordinary to keep.
The poem was about the way the light came through the factory windows at four in the afternoon, the way the machines hummed in a rhythm that was almost a song, the way the floor was worn smooth by forty years of the same footsteps. It was about the smell of machine oil and the taste of the tea from the canteen and the way the men stood in the doorway at the end of the shift, watching the sky change colour.
He read it to a room of people who had worked with him for decades, men and women who had stood in the same doorway and smelled the same oil and drunk the same tea. When he finished there was a silence that was not empty. It was full of the thing the poem had said, the thing that everyone in the room knew but nobody had ever said out loud.
He did not write about the big days. He wrote about the Tuesdays, because the Tuesdays were the thing that made the big days matter. The factory was not the promotions or the near-closures; it was the light at four in the afternoon and the worn floor and the men in the doorway.
I keep the poem on my desk now, framed, next to the watch. The watch is the company's. The poem is his.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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