FOLLOWER My father worked with a horse plough. His shoulders globed like a full sail strung between the shafts and the furrow. The horses strained at his clicking tongue. AN EXPERT He would set the wing and fit the bright steel-pointed sock. The sod rolled over without breaking At the head-rig, with a single pluck of reins, the sweating team turned round and back into the land, his eye narrowed and angled at the ground, mapping the furrow exactly. I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake, fell sometimes on the polished sod. Sometimes he rode me on his back, dipping and rising to his plod. I wanted to grow up and plough, to close one eye, stiffen my arm. All I ever did was follow in his broad shadow round the farm. I was a nuisance, tripping, falling, yapping always. But today it is my father who keeps stumbling behind me and will not go away.