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Daddy at the Door<br />
If we came home like drowned kittens<br />
You’d shake our coats out on the landing<br />
After you’d gone<br />
I dreamt I came in with a wet coat<br />
And you said it’s okay son<br />
Just hang it on top of mine<br />
Yours was wet through<br />
I wasn’t scared of dying then.<br />
On My Father’s Refusal to Renew his Subscription to The Beijing<br />
Review<br />
He’s fallen out with everyone,<br />
including God, but hasn’t had a rift with China.<br />
Yet he’s set his face against renewal.<br />
‘Getting near the end now’.<br />
He never speaks of death or dying.<br />
At ninety-eight too late to start anew?<br />
‘Aye, getting near the end’.<br />
What can he mean?<br />
A Five Year Plan whose targets he can’t meet?<br />
Is he thinking of Taiwan?<br />
Another link in the Great Chain of Beijing<br />
They’ll repossess it,<br />
just like they did Hong Kong,<br />
toying with America.<br />
All the more good cause to sign<br />
along the dotted line?<br />
Five more years’ deliverance by airmail.<br />
Not filtered by the West<br />
Through The Guardian digest<br />
But straight from the red, red heart of the world.<br />
Old-timer’s Disease<br />
When my mother was at school eighty years ago
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