Questions For A Dead Relative Poem by J A Proudfoot

He was three when you left.
How was that goodbye?
You stood outside the door in your chapel clothes
and held your hopes in your suitcase,
while he clung to her flour dusting.
She had baked…..She always baked,
but today she was baking to stop herself from falling apart.
Did she mark your promise to send for them
with a rolling tear?

Did you listen to your inner voice
as you walked away?
And as you stood at the station
fumbling in your pockets,
shifting the loose change of your love around,
did you find the sandwich she made you,
crammed with self forgiveness?
How soon after you arrived on those
flat Canadian plains,
had they slipped silently down the chute of yesterday?

He waited by the church hall,
on the hill,
every morning except Sundays,
swarming the postman's uphill struggle.
And when three months passed with no word,
he stopped waiting,
in the way a child can switch off
and a partner can't.
What had gone so wrong?

What had gone so wrong that,
you let 1926 become 1976 before you returned?
She had died the year before.
Was that the invitation you needed?
And every year of the last ten that you visited us,
craggy and silver, smelling of cigarettes,
betting on horses, drinking Colt 45
and eating fried tomato sandwiches,
I let you be an enigma.

My grandfather.....but a stranger from a strange country.
You didn't chat, you sat with us and watched TV,
and no doubt felt you wanted to belong to a family in your last years.
I guess any family would have done,
but we had a blood bond and a house full of unspoken restraint.
My father wept when he got that scratchy call
to say that you were dead.
He cried more than when his mother died,
but I think he was crying over things left unresolved and unsaid.
Now I think I know what made you leave,
I can guess what made you stay away,
and I hope,
its not hereditary.