i.m. Charlotte Annie Bodsworth Grantham: 1944

The long road from the farm was longer then, the chickens fed, breakfast on the table, then stopping trains and unfamiliar stations to Grantham’s cobbled market squares.

You came to see your newborn grandchild, the poet sleeping in his earliest days.
Nothing would have stopped you, a right lass, livelier than the youngsters in your black shawl.

You died weeks later, as the bluebells came. ‘Seeing you,’ my father said, a family joke. The long journey a likelier story.
And mine, in after-years, struggling for words.

You came to see your newborn grandchild, a day’s trip away from Pillar Box Farm, to make your claim on an unknown future, plant the seeds of our secret harvest.

This was the winning poem of The London Magazine’s first worldwide Poetry Competiton 2014