to my father, Clifford Graham

Apart from the Christmas card after the Armistice

you only had a single thing of his:

a dressing-table tub, of faceted, thick glass

(with a lid of tarnished tin pretending to be brass)

for studs and cuff-links – you used it for your own.

Your sudden death, coming before I’d grown

mature enough to question for myself

left mysteries. Where was his grave?

Years later, when I rang to ask, Auntie Olive

didn’t hang up – she just  walked off

rather than choose either say or not say.

The Grahams hated – feared – giving anything away.

I paid to find his grave, then turned up with a film crew

– a Graham at the opposite extreme: broadcasting news –

in June of ’89. My Welsh boss, on a whim,

had ordered, ‘While you’re there, shoot a film,

about yourself’, so I focused on Thomas Graham.

My piece-to-camera by the carved surname,

by the granite that gave me date and place of death,

cried down the binary Protestant/Catholic myth.

Didn’t I embody a far more complex story?

I claimed him, against any who would take him from me.

As I claimed you. The three of us would come into the light

together. Something true would happen – scathing; right.