Julia Casterton
Grandfather (India, Khartoum, Ireland)
In the garden you leant down on me
a jackdaw on your shoulder.
She dug in her claws,
I hung hard on your arm.
Smells of roses pressed against
your bending nose. I floated
below you, my hands cupped
to carry dead blooms
along the path we both had made
to and from the heap.
Between her mad flapping
and my breathless need
your mind felt full and safe
from the faces that burned round its edges
as round a quiet lake.
Now, I want to believe
that you were haunted
right through that busyness -
by India, where you suffocated
the dying between mattresses,
by Khartoum, where you filled a well
with ‘niggers’,
by Ireland, of which you never spoke
but grew a hard and twisted shell
or made a joke, a signal of
distress.
They never sent you to China,
you smashed your ankle with a hatchet
just before -
What part does a garden play
in a man’s life? What part a child?
Those thoughts still killed you in the end.
I could not keep them quite at bay
or douse the fires that burned,
or turn the pages of your mind
and rub the faces clean away -
that still rise up and stare at me
each time I bend to smell a rose.
Page(s) 41
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