Poem for my grandmother.

Lotty Kneen
1916-2014


I remember your skin
Rough and weathered
On my childish forehead
Wiping fever dreams
Worn away by work then time
Till it is tissue, soft as memory
So slight a wrapping for sharp regrets.

In grief
A queen forbade them to remove her king
And sat him up at table.
Ate with him, slept with him,
Waved from the royal carriage at his mouldering side.
Imagine
The temptation to touch what was once warm,
Cold on a pillow damp with death
Folding now into itself, going to ground

I dig
A hole
For what remains of your burned blood
A hollow in the earth
To place the grit that might be bone or rock or salt
I pick a grain of you, stolen from the urn.
And place it on my tongue.
Your body.
My blood.

You lodge inside me.

Now
In dream
In breath
In all the painful trudge of days ahead
I grow more like my final taste of you
In grit.
In earth
In death.