This week's poem, "My Grandmother's Opal" by Grevel Lindop, is a quest to reveal the past. The last line-and-a-quarter sums up the significance and difficulty of the quest: "this one spark / saved from the fiery heart of a lost world". Adrift in attics and cupboard drawers, such tantalising "sparks" may be all we have of that mysterious immensity, a person's life, reminding us how little we truly know the people we're closely related to: the grandparents who died before we properly "met" them; that venerable great-grandparent we just missed. Perhaps they remind us, too, of the future whose past we will sooner or later become – our grandchildren, their grandchildren. These distant relatives haunt Christmastime in our culture. To borrow the poem's words, they offer love we can never return – nor properly receive - but which can sometimes seem profoundly present.
My Grandmother's Opal
Nowadays I can find no picture of her.
I lost the only photograph I had
moving house; nothing else came to me,
so all I keep now is this opulent bead,
milky violet, craggy sugar-white
and crumpled goldleaf fused into the one
hurtfully alluring crystal depth
of opal, her favourite stone,
which like a scrying-globe entraps the eye;
though I should need more than a jeweller's glass
to see what figures might flaw the blue mist
or walk unscathed out of that golden furnace,
distant and enigmatic, bright and small
as now my memories of her: some stories
and nonsense-rhymes she riddled me out of her childhood,
odd scents she used, her sharp, affectionate gaze,
skirts I buried my face in, and the love
which like an animal I could discern,
inhabit like warmth but never comprehend
or, so young I was, return.
So here is it, my grandmother's opal,
centrepiece of a necklace broken and strewn
who now knows where? And of no use to me,
too large for a ring, too splendid to cut down,
message I can't read, riches not mine
to spend or give, unexplained trust I hold.
I keep it: but where shall I set it, this one spark
saved from the fiery heart of a lost world?
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