My father began as a god – 51x41cm

My grandson atop his father’s shoulders at Clovelly headland reminded me of Atlas holding up his world but this poem ‘My father began as a god’ by Ian Mudie better exemplifies the evolving relationship between children and their parents. My father began as a god, full of heroic tales of days when he was young. His laws were as immutable as if brought down from Sinai, which indeed he thought they were. He fearlessly lifted me to heaven by a mere swing to his shoulder, and made me a godling by seating me astride our milch-cow’s back, and, too, upon the great white gobbler of which others went in constant fear. Strange then how he shrank and shrank until by my time of adolescence he had become a foolish small old man with silly and outmoded views of life and of morality. Stranger still that as I became older his faults and intolerances scaled away into the past, revealing virtues such as honesty, generosity, integrity. Strangest of all how the deeper he recedes into the grave the more I see myself as just one more of all the little men who creep through life not knee-high to this long dead god.