The family face

 

Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash

"I am the family face; 
Flesh perishes, I live on"  ‘Heredity’, Thomas Hardy

The extraordinary ordinariness of the everyday
Day-in-day-out: work, eat, sleep then go away.
Like places at the table becoming vacant one-by-one.
This is what happens to families. They wither, die,
Then sprout anew. But not the same family, and not
The same you. No man enters the same river twice.
Houses become homes, children become parents,
Time rolls on. But slivers of the past remain, not
Only in DNA and names but odd congruences:
“She has her mother’s way with her, it’s uncanny.”
“ His grandfather had just that way of leaning back,
Resting on his heels.” In the melee of the constant
Present, sometimes we miss these traces of the past,
Traits we pass on, unknowingly, the only things that last.