Helen Dunmore - The Man on the Roof 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 Ma**. 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