Grandfather (Poetry)

Some time after you’d gone, I noticed how
men of a certain age and social strata tend
to conform and, from a distance, look the same.
Perhaps it’s just I’m more observant now,
or maybe lightweight ecru car coats are the trend
for older gents of medium height and frame.

Your silver tonsure follows me around,
bespectacled, each sighting sends the sudden jolt
of long distance recognition’s double take.
I’m fooled by fawn or beige or biscuit brown,
a superficial likeness, as a random bolt
of memory strikes then realises its mistake.

The likelihood I’ll ever quite forget
the way you were, as time goes rolling on and on,
is minimal — you’ve a host of living clones
reminding me like visual prompts pre-set
at intervals along the years that you’ve been gone
to sustain that sense of kinship death disowns.

It is a small deceit of mind and eye,
engendered by affection and what sometimes seems
an unnameable too shadowy to say —
this gentle haunting, blood bonds that still tie,
linking past and present, encoded in shared genes —
casting images that never go away.