Poem of the month

selected by David Underdown, who writes the footnote.

Tea for My Father

by Michael Hoffman

I think of his characteristic way
of saying ‘tea’, with his teeth
bared and clenched in anticipation.
It is not his first language nor
his favourite drink, so there is
something exotic about both word and
thing. He asks for it several times
a day, in the morning and afternoon
only. Mostly it is to help him work.
He likes it very strong, with cream,
in mugs, and sweetens it himself.
He puts it on the window-sill in front
of his table, and lets it go cold.
Later on, I come and throw it out.

The poet and translator Michael Hoffman was born in Germany in 1957. When he was four years old his family came to live in Bristol and subsequently Edinburgh. His combative relationship with his father, the novelist Gert Hoffman, was the subject of his 1986 collection, ‘Acrimony’ and was also chronicled in a television documentary. The tone of this poem taken from Hoffman’s later collection ‘Approximately Nowhere’ (published by Faber in 1999) is gentler and captures the exasperation we can so often feel about an ageing parent.