The Man on the Roof by Helen Dunmore Lyrics

When my grandmother died my father eulogised her.
There she was, coming home with the pram
and her crowd of children
when something strange in the light
or its impediment getting at her from heaven
made her look up to see one of her children –
her eldest child, her son, him –
up on the roof, riding the horse of the homestead
with wild heels, daring her to defy him
and get him down. She got him down
with a word, as he remembers it,
her lovely penny-pale face looking up at his
from the path where her children swarmed and shouted
and it was this
he remembered when her coffin lay under his hands:
the roof, and his coming down.
When our priest died I remembered him
up on the roof, mending a tile
– a little job on hand, and a hammer
and air of busyness to keep him busy
while he pretended not to be pretending
to ride the roof in its wild beauty
over the unfamilied air of Liscannor
and half-way to America. Maybe.
Or maybe merely tapping the tile in
like a good workman.
‘How beautiful it was up on the roof,’
he said to the people at Mass.
My father touched his mother’s coffin
and did not say how golden her hair was.
Even I remember how golden it was
when the grey knot was undone.
Now they are gone into the ground,
both of them. They are riding on the roof,
their wild heels daring us to defy them,
and we are here on the ground
penny-pale and gaping.
They will not tell
how beautiful it is. I will not ask them