Listening To An Old Tape-Recording... Poem by Roy William Gotaas

On Listening to an old tape recording, from Christmas 1961, in June 2004.

All dead...all long since barely bones but one.
Muffled voices struggling through a hissing curtain; a shroud really,
The tape brittle and mouldy with age.

My Grandma’s voice, London’s east-ender: so gentle,
A little shaky, tremulous with Parkinson's
But somehow still the pivot, fulcrum of all our love.
Handed such a hard life but always giving back in kindness,
My Grandma who would play any game with me and innocently
Let me play any childish trick on her:
Always forgiving & forgetting, keeping me, when she could,
From fear and hurt.

My Father’s voice, deep, precise and a little slow and breathy
From the sickness that, unknown to us then, would see him buried
To the sound of bugles, six months later.
Among the muffled sounds and phrases he says,
In a line of a running joke between us all, quite distinctly
“I haven’t got much time”.
Oh my Pa, you didn’t have, did you?
My Mother said you loved me very much and that you were proud of me:
Why did you fill my childhood with fear?
You were hard like a rock and when you died the rock was gone from beneath our feet.
I think I loved you and was proud of you, but you never held me,
Never gave me comfort and I was too frightened to come close to you.

And then, by dying, you murdered my youth: at fifteen I wouldn’t believe the betrayal
And invented stories to explain your absence,
Listened for your firm footsteps on the gravel of the driveway,
Saw you in dreams.
And when, as the years accumulated and other men failed as father-figures,
I finally accepted the shots over your grave as your goodbye,
I was angry and resentful.
Only now, as I hear your muffled voice and feel hardly any fear of it,
I find I have loved you and been proud of you.

My Mother’s voice, soft crystal, sparkling, a tiny lisp now and then;
The voice that always meant love, that somehow framed the beautiful in life;
That in a few words made you know in your bones why it was so worth living.
She had only to speak, to smile, to enter a room and the air was full of lilacs and love:
Out of all the muffled sounds it is her cascading laughter
That comes through most clearly, starting landslides
From the rest of us.

And the young boy’s voice? The English so pure that today
It sounds almost a charicature; his laughter revealing the cracks of a breaking voice:
What of him, the only and often unwilling survivor?
At fourteen he knew a little more fear than the average
And a lot more love than most:
How could he know that six months later his world would change,
The sun would be orange instead of gold,
Colours would go from the rainbows
And dogs would howl beneath his window at night?

Listening back now from more than forty years,
I see the boy is as long dead as the others:
He went somewhere in the welter and mess of grief
That followed and continued after that Christmas.
Listening to those muffled, ghostly voices now
I know I am not he in any shape or form:
All we have in common, he and I,
Is that our tears are salty.