We often take our senses for granted after all most of us have had them since we were born but as we get older, age steals them from us in some form or other and this is true of my father. He has never had great hearing due to the job he once did, fashioning, pressing and engraving metal long before the days of health and safety and ear defenders.
Recently his hearing has got worse and this morning I replied to a question and he went off in a different direction based on another answer possibly because he could not use his old trick of reading lips that he is becoming more and more reliant on.
Fade Out
Egg boxes creep like barnacles on a boat.
Somewhere a ships horn becomes a broken telegraph,
smudged in white like unfinished crosswords
he pens in a sound,
finds misunderstanding at his feet
dressed in a broken plate of static lips .
