Blood Ties
Blood Ties I
Cloth cut, blood and water
Skin and bone shaped
Different daughters.
Here we are the products of you
Parcelled up, mewling new.
Jump down from trees
Scuffed shoes and knees
Blonde and brown
Little neat cut fringes - we
The ghosts of your parents’ parents.
Pinky promise
Matching clothes
To the shops and linking arms.
Blonde natters while brown listens
On the bus: bask in each other’s silence.
Go to school,
Separate classes
Across corridors, swept apart -
A glimpse and a wave and a
See you at home.
Cross the country
Roll the dice
Where will you two go?
One goes North and the other goes South
We’re packages delivered to the rest of the world.
Back for Christmas – there you are
From the train and into the rain
What’s that you’re wearing, can I try?
Sisters, same flesh threads
Blood tied and swapping fashion.
Blood Ties II
Do you remember,
when we rewrote the family tree?
And unravelled the blood ties
to thread together again.
An overnight arrival,
don’t you remember?
A dark, thick fringe over wide-eyed
blinking, drinking everyone in.
Do you remember,
how different you were and dragging around
the history of you like a tattered blanket
frayed edges tickling smooth new ground.
What were you thinking,
can’t you remember?
As you thumbed through adult books
scanning the words which you didn’t yet know.
Yet, in you slipped.
Remember becoming the tail end of this
new band of blood ties, skipping with your
Coat hanger shoulders and your matchstick knees?
Our ages, they are laid out before us
like a series of stair steps.
Do you remember hormones, how they fizzed,
cracked and fired? Soothed and restarted.
Do you remember
when the world ended?
How we fell silent in unison
and we could read each others’ minds.
Time was heavier than bricks
and tears were shifting mortar.
When everyone around us became strangers,
anyone who wasn’t formed in our blood ties.
Do you remember
scratching our fingernails in to preserve our ties?
And so looks passed between us are as wealthy
as a word, a sentence, a book.