Every summer, my grandparents visited
the fishing village in Scotland where she grew up,
where he was stationed in the army.
They brought back a crateload, caseful
of kippers, strapped them to the car roof and the box
cast its stinking shadow down the road home.
Back in Wales, my grandad’s brothers, sisters
waited, feasted for a month on that smoked flesh,
raising my grandmother’s birthplace to their lips
and chewing it, and calling it delicious.
My grandmother sat in silence all the way home,
eleven months from when she’d see again
her mother, sisters, the coastline that her childhood
sounded like. As soon as they got home, my grandad quickly
opened the crate, released the stench of kippers,
as if in a rush to find what it really was
he’d brought back across two borders, all those rivers.
