The Mountains
A grey-faded memory of my émigré aunt,
on the quayside,
where we saw her off on a mountainous ship:
My Dad, an old salt, so going aboard,
(treading the deck) was required,
until we disembarked, before her departure.
**
On that same dock, over twenty years later,
I dug on the grain mountain, but failed to work out
my previous time there:
I only saw others’ ghosts in the redundancy
of the migrant-shipping sheds,
left behind, dusty pendants in the voids above the grain.
The same dockside sheds from where my Aunt had set sail,
in a previous incarnation,
when I was shoulder-carried by my own mountain:
Only now, this night, I reconnect those two pasts
in these greying surveys,
within my contour lines, marking my life, re-mapped.