Tonight's Poet Corner: Seamus
Seamus by Belinda Roddie He was ashamed that his son, once a good man, was now a slave driver in the southeast of Africa. Crops to be yielded, food to be served to men in white suits and black cigars and walrus grins under walrus mustaches. Billowing smoke from under their tailcoats, propelling them from their chairs where the wax oozed from letter stamps and stained their already red hands red. Seamus was better than his own son. He didn't want to be. He didn't think he had to be. He was the minister at a small Irish church, where the friends of his dead wife asked him how it all went so terribly wrong for little Seamus junior. Wafers stuck to their tongues and kept them quiet only for a short while, before the interrogation started all over again. He washed his hands of him, holy water darkening his fingers, spreading ash across his skin, sinking into the wrinkles particle by particle; only dust was all that carried him to his bed each night wh