Grandfathers

Grandfathers wear hats, different kinds of hats,

many, of nations and teams, and rank and file

and class and table and I think of one of mine,

Oapa, always sitting at the head of, in an office, 

on the road, in his castle, by the rooftop turrets 

in The Blitz; tin hat, radio, siren, waiting

and listening out for the engines, the bombs to hit,

the sound of his erstwhile countrymen, or back

interned, sitting and listening in a hut on the Isle 

of Man for the next boat coming in. Waiting

and listening, back to the songs of Berlin

turning to goosesteps, turning to

ashes of musical score, books and birds

on a wire, war, his Morse code crystal nights

stargazing, waiting and listening for just a word.

Top hat, tails, marriages, contracts – in the level-headed

whisper of baldness and sunspots, stories in hats,

cellars full of suitcases, in ledgers and transactions,

stories there, wanting that we should live.

Robin's earstwhile, poem
Last time I checked, poem

Oapa

Grandmothers

Grandmothers are on the radio

remembering

the times they had already made into cakes,

when they had darned socks, married, had kids

against the curtained backdrops of what they

wrote about. The world around them

weaving through them was

what they became known for,

their wisdom dispensed in sherry glass

sizes – mothball asides back then, dusty;

musty nowadays when our legends live with

living legends, not all dead white men. 

And now, who would not thank these weavers

of lost voices that bring us to the village of

living elders, taking tea on the radio?

Who would not thank them, except

the dead or lost boys not grown up yet

who back then wouldn’t have payed attention to how

she cross-stitched or did anything much anyway,

as they would never have wanted to know her

like we do. These same ones by the radio listening

for their mothers and grandmothers, crying

for a bedtime story of their histories when she may

have told them already, only hers. It’s then we

remember bicycles and broken shells, spaces

we could claim have always been - fields of white, 

purple, gold and green.