4 March 2021
Cutting Water by Emily Pritchard
My father chose the flattest stones,
skimming them out to sea,
and taught me never
to walk on a beach
without filling my pockets
with pebbles. When was it
that he learnt to skim?
And who taught him?
I know small things
about that boy.
How he’d sit tensed
with terror when the bus
crossed the Menai bridge
to school, how he wore shorts
when no one else did.
If I could, I’d stop
my tiny father’s ears,
stopper his father’s bottle,
erase those years
of drink. Like a stone
flung from some Welsh cliff
fifty years ago,
my father’s fear leaps
across decades, touches
the surface then rises again,
skimming, skipping
through all our lives.
We’re on a beach again.
My white-haired father, quiet
careful man, bends down to sift
the stones and find the ones
that skim. He’s got the knack,
the flick of wrist
that spins stones out.
My father’s learnt
to let himself be loved, and loves,
and speaks of it. Call it
cutting water, throwing plates,
the way a dragonfly
crosses a pool: he skims
the stone and it travels so far
that if the sea were not the sea,
it would have reached the other side.
Emily Pritchard lives in Edinburgh. They have poems in Abridged, Blackbox Manifold, and Magma, and recently completed their MA dissertation on butch poetics. Find them on Twitter @poetrypritch.
