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Jane Routh

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Robert and Rosannah

Wrap up well. Did she know
she would not see him again?

Fourteen by one account, fifteen
in another, did he leave alone

or did all the landless village men
set off that year in company?

One thing’s certain: he
would have had to work his passage.

Did he send word he had arrived;
that he’d started out in forwarding;

that he was handling corn, and on his own account;
was in the Corn Exchange, President of the Board of Trade?

Did he send her the newspaper engraving,
her mild-eyed youngest with his sober beard

who takes a quiet but earnest interest in public questions
and was born, it says - as if it were a curiosity -

half a world away in Yorkshire England?
How much did he remember of its red earth

flat fields fast waters pear trees retting ponds
church spire and his mother

who did not read? And if they existed
did she keep the letters he sent,

thinking how his hands had folded them?
And did anyone tell him when she died?

Did a daughter-in-law, briskly clearing the house,
glance through worn papers under the mahogany tea-box

then drop them into the grate, to flare
for a moment in the flames Rosannah had watched

through the winter evenings of her widowhood
seeing in them all the children she had lost?

Page(s) 54-55

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