My Father was a Buckingham Palace Guard
his Bearskin hat rising to the sky
like a giant fur bullet or the whorl of a gargantuan poppy.
It was only in photos years later that he explained

It was tight-stretched fur over a wicker cage -
and that this huge black Bearskin comprised one and a half
pounds of winter and summer head-weight, the bloodlike drop
of a red hackle feather embedded snugly in its dense pelt.

And on the ground, his onyx shoes,
reflected the red margins of his Coldstream creases
soaring towards a vertical equator
of paired brass buttons on a scarlet tunic.

These days I touch the photo’s metal petals of my father’s
shoulder rose, his sparkling garter star,
his gold chin-chain and his young-sloped nose
until I arrive at his vanished fur-screened eyes.

Clodagh Beresford Dunne has won Irish Poem of the Year, The Irish Arts Council Emerging Writer Award and the UK’s Clarissa Luard Emerging Writer Award (having been nominated for the latter by Edna O’Brien DBE)