"TRUSHAM" BY CHARLES CAUSLEY

Painted on the side of the village bus shelter

In this blown house my grandfather was born

And here his father first unshook his bones.

Walking the churchyard as a child, I saw

My slate name on their double page of stones.

The War memorial - a lump of rock,

Upended rollers, lengths of iron twine.

Crests like a coaster the hills wave. I read

The bullet - coloured names. My father's. Mine.

In Rattle Street the mud is Flanders-thick,

An old man, shoulder-sacked against the rain

Under the dropping fingers of a rick

Asks, "What is it that brings you here again?

"You never married, and you've got no child

(I don't know what you dad would say to that.)

And you the only one. It seems to me

That when you've gone, the name will just go scat."

How can I tell  him that the sounding heart -

Oiled with the same old blood - can't be rest?

Useless to say that this particular flesh

Won't scrape off, dry off, like the mud, the wet.

Beyond those pale disturbances of sky

Another year assembles its vast floe.

Ice line the turning air. It softens. Soon

Advances from the west the carrion snow.