Genealogy poems

Two poems about my great-great-grandmother.

Many years ago I started to delve into family history. The easiest line to follow was the female line since I had birth certificates and other documents going back to the 19th century.

From there I moved to the Parish records, census records, old post office directories, newspapers, cemetery records, and more.

Then one day I stumbled across three letters someone had posted online. I think the site has since been taken down and I’d have to go looking again to find them. If I remember correctly they were written in 1879, 1880, and 1881. Written by the older sister of the woman I’m writing about below in The Last Night.

I wrote the poem before I read the letters.

The letters were written to relatives who’d left for Canada many years before. But they also opened up new information about the past since the writer’s father (my great-great-great grandfather) had just died in the middle letter (if I remember correctly), and she talked about the graveyard where her family had arranged for an ancestor’s gravestone to be cleaned up or upkept in some way. This ancestor was a minister, born in the 1500s.

All of a sudden my path into the past leaped back by centuries.

I haven’t written any poems dealing with the new information. It’s been a long time since I’ve written poetry since I always tended more towards fiction. But I dug up some old poems in lieu of still not sorting out the next short story.

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The Last Night
What did you think about, lying in bed that last night
in the cottage, before your departure to the big city,
an industrial Hades from which you'd never return?
Did you think about your mother, many years in her grave?
Remember the smell of her cooking, or the dried herring
hanging from the ceiling? Did they hang there still?
Did you lie awake thinking of your past, the fights and laughter
of siblings long since grown and left for Campbeltown
or even the Americas? Or did you look forward to the leaving,
cleave to the notion of a new life far away from this one?
Did you already see yourself on an imagined Glasgow street,
pausing at a passing Highland lilt or the sound of the Gaelic?
Did you imagine yourself there in the future, on a spring day,
thinking of the oystercatchers returning to your old village
and the sea loch, or the opening of the mountain passes?
Or did you just lie in fear that last night, saying your prayers,
hoping that God would protect you from the heathens?

---

Otago Street
I passed a young Highland woman
in the street today.
She didn't see me.
Her blurred face looked beyond, 
colourless eyes fixed on a future
already behind me.
Her hair of unknown shade
and fashion, shawl-sheltered
from the rain.
With each step she took,
kicking out her dark hem,
she left her stone village 
ever further to the west.

I turned, followed,
and in the darkening
saw the empty street,
tenemented in old and new,
shimmer transparent
on screens of sodium-lit rain.
And from behind the screens,
from behind the rain,
long-skirted women emerged,
shawled or bonneted,
and men in dark suits and waistcoats,
with hats or caps,
and long side whiskers.
They passed by,
but didn't see me.

I fell into step beside her,
and I might as well have been the rain
when she turned and looked right through me.
We paused at the kerb.
Neither her face,
nor the horse and cart lumbering by
were reflected in the glass
of the passing taxi,
whose fat wheels rolled on
like years, faster
than cartwheels clattering
on cobblestones.
We crossed the street,
parted.
I watched 
as she slipped through veils of rain,
dissolving into colourless transparency.
I turned, walked on,
each step opening up another year.
A hundred and sixty or more
to the end of this road.

I passed my great-great-grandmother
in the street today.
She didn't see me.

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These poems are dedicated to my great-great-grandmother Marion, born in Argyle in 1940, who moved to Glasgow.