Thicker than water

Moving house, packing things from the loft

I find a picture, wood-framed, snug

beneath the dust of years.

Under the light and polished glass

pencil-drawn turrets are freed, stone walls rise, 

the low angled view of a church spire 

next to a castle, where tiny ant-like people walk,

women and children in bonnets and a man 

constrained with stick and top hat 

is crossing the moat’s footbridge.

I read the spiky letters on the back,

my grandmother’s half-forgotten script:

your ancestors moving into their new home

in eighteen hundred and fifteen. Drawn by them.

She always wanted me to know about her blood

thicker than water and the past

she carefully spread out in diaries 

for me, her only grandchild, born to a dead son.

There is no time for voices of the dead

in hurried years. I never knew how much 

I missed her voice until it spoke again

and carried like a bell from then to now.

As if she wanted me to find her things,

when I’m all set, when values shift, when skin

gets colourless like pencil drawings

and memories defend like castle moats, 

when hair shows grey like still uncertain years, 

when houses come and go, when blood delightfully 

runs slower, not as water runs, 

for it is thicker, so she said, than water.