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Joy Ardy

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Grandmother's Footsteps

Maud’s big as a pantomime giant, planted on the rag rug,
tight-laced and bunion-knobbled, spit-polished,
or hobbling bulky round the black-lead kitchen,
where the copper’s steam of reeking sheets turned my stomach.
She boiled giblets in an enamel pan, relished the parson’s nose
from our Christmas turkey, crocheted tiny lace edgings
with terrible fingers clawed into hooked talons.
Sunday tea, always at our house, and she mumbled pickled onions
with toothless gums, left her hanky on the table.

Edie’s, twinkling and shuffling in the scrubbed scullery,
snug in bobbled slippers. She’d cut the whole top crust
off a golden bloomer for me, sing What a friend we have in Jesus,
her voice swooping like Uncle Raynham’s harmonium.
Her mouth pursed with laughter over stories of naughty dog Ben
who stole the Christmas tree jujubes, as she boiled me eggs
I’d fetched from the garden, magicked rabbits into pies.
She let me swing the mangle, count the leathery beans
drying on the bamboo table, pick the purple lilac from her garden.

There you both stand now, on the other side of the road,
backs towards me, waiting. Maud in navy crêpe and a hairnet,
Edie in a flowery pinafore. I stepped off the kerb long since,
have been creeping up on you across the pockmarked gravel.
Can you hear me coming?

 

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