Featured Poem

Worker

Brian Daldorph

My father was up at 5 every morning:

“The best time of the day!” he’d say.

“It’s when I can think straight!”

My father was a writer:

he wrote advertisements

for anyone who’d pay him:

double glazing, sugar, chocolate bars,

the Dairy Association, politicians.

My father called himself some word

that rhymed with door,

and when my mother gave him her look,

he’d say, pointing at me, “He doesn’t understand.”

His ad-writing came later in the day.

5 a.m. was novel-writing time,

my father’s mysterious project

that he worked on for years

and no one ever saw,

the book that was going to give back

to my father everything he’d sold,

the book that would give him more

than he got as that word that rhymed with floor.

Originally published in Coneflower Cafe, 2022.