I’m not sure when my father wrote this poem, but my sense is, he penned it years after he left my mother with four children under the age of 13 and returned to England, where he had completed his basic training before embarking on a troop ship to fight his WWII battles in the stinking, fly-bitten sands of the Middle East. There was a woman there in England — I will not say her name — for when dad heeded her siren call again after a decade of absence, his desertion broke my mother’s heart and left us destitute in so many ways. We never lost touch, though, because my mother believed that blood would tell. As an adult, reintroduced to him in the…

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