Ancestry

The damp had got its grip years ago

but gone unnoticed. The heads of the joists

feathered slowly in the cavity wall

and the room’s wet belly had begun to bow.

Once we’d ripped the boards up, it all came out:

the smell, at first, then the crumbling wood

gone to seed, all its muscles wasted.

You pottered back and to with tea, soda bread,

eighty years shaking on a plastic tray.

One by one we looked up, nodded, then slipped

under the floor. We moved down there like fish

in moonlight, or divers round an old ship.