Two Poets Remember Their Fathers

 Browsing last night in my bedside poetry books, I found these two poems – very different in style but linked by a common theme – one after the other, just like that. 
First, Geoffrey Hill, in a poem (the first of his Soliloquies) dedicated to Charles Causley, a poet of a very different stamp...

The Stone Man

Recall, now, the omens of childhood:
The nettle-clump and rank elder-tree;
The stones waiting in the mason's yard:

Half-recognised kingdom of the dead:
A deeper landscape lit by distant
Flashings from their journey. At nightfall

My father scuffed clay into the house.
He set his boots on the bleak iron
Of the hearth; ate, drank, unbuckled, slept.

I leaned to the lamp; the pallid moths 
Clipped its glass, made an autumnal sound.
Words clawed my mind as though they had smelt

Revelation's flesh... So, with an ease
That is dreadful, I summon all back.
The sun bellows over its parched swarms.

Hill's father was the policeman in his Worcestershire village (Fairfield. By the way, I wonder if anyone is working on a biography of Hill?).
The second poem is by the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, whose father was a lawyer who worked as a bank manager, and had fought in the Polish Legions in the First World War. 

Remembering My Father

His face severe in clouds above the waters of childhood

so rarely did he hold my warm head in his hands

given to belief not forgiving faults

because he cleared our woods and straightened paths

he carried the lantern high when we entered the night

I thought I would sit at his right hand

and we would separate light from darkness

and judge those of us who live

—it happened otherwise

A junk dealer carried his throne on a hand-cart

and the deed of ownership the map of our kingdom

he was born a second time slight very fragile

with transparent skin hardly perceptible cartilage

he diminished his body so I might receive it

in an unimportant place there is shadow under a stone 

he himself grows in me we eat our defeats

we burst out laughing

when they say how little is needed

to be reconciled