Tombstones – Nicholas McGaughey

Tombstones

Easter Sundays we’d go with flowers
to visit people I’d never talked to.
It was a ritual, like cleaning windows:
remembering the dead. At Cadle,

Gran didn’t spend long with her mother;
a cursory swish of the marble,
a spray of daffs in a jam jar.
No words. No looking back.

At Caersalem, Grampa’s parents lay
overgrown with sally rhubarb
thrusting through the sandstone
like Japanese pipe-work. Here,

we hacked a manger ‘round the slab
of their little lives, and read-out the words
carved in Welsh, with more love than all
the tidied quiet on the good side of town.

…

Nicholas has new work forthcoming in Scintilla 23 and The Atlanta Review. He has had work recently in Popshot/Prole/Poetry Salzburg/Acumen/Marble/Poetry Scotland and “Poems About Running” (Smith/Doorstop.