Heritage

Back in May, I attended the funeral of my grandad. The service was a thanksgiving for, and celebration of, the life of a well-loved man. He, like the majority of my family, had a strong Christian faith and there was a powerful sense of shared hope for a heavenly consolation as a packed church congregation sang together throughout the service.

Certain lines from the hymns stood out to me, and I hope to be able to write poems that echo them:

Drop thy still dews of quietness,

till all our strivings cease…

Mine is the sunlight

Mine is the morning

I looked to Jesus, and I found

In Him my Star, my Sun;

And in that Light of Life I’ll walk

Till trav’lling days are done.

This post was begun soon after the event, but I didn’t manage to finish it at the time. For many reasons – some of which I will blog about another time. But one reason was because of a poem I wrote for my Grandma about my Grandad. I gave it to her at the funeral. I believe she got it printed in that Sunday’s edition of Pew News, the notice bulletin handed out at her church. But it felt a bit too soon to go more ‘public’ with it (that is, pretending the readership of this blog extends further than my immediate family…).

Except…

The week after the funeral, I entered the poem in a poetry competition. In fact, it had been written to conform specifically to the exacting demands of the competition – an 821 poem, which has an initial stanza of 8 lines, followed by a couplet and ending with a single line, which should also contain a volta or ‘twist’ of some kind. The organisers also stated (as most competitions/publishers do) that the work must not have been published anywhere before, including on a personal blog. Luckily, my offering was met with a polite ‘no’ from the competition, which means that I can put it on here.

So, although it feels a bit morally ambiguous that I wrote a poem that was simultaneously for my Grandma as she mourns her husband, and also an entry for a competition, it is also my tribute to my Grandad.

Heritage

My grandad, with his northern vowels,

‘Let’s ‘av a luke’, ‘bring me that buke’.

Child-me thrilled at the way he spoke.

My grandad, on his daily strolls

‘cross Cookham Moor to the churchyard.

My grandad, the musical lad:

church organist, and taught my dad.

Now my sons caress the keyboard.

My grandad, who made pilgrimage,

and brought back stones from Galilee,

has come into his heritage.