‘where the surname was first noted’

It is a hopeful name to be born to.

It promises Spring; it sings of pickings

from a lost family orchard, an Eden

on Severn banks, a fruit that is ripe

yet always green.  Hold it to your cheek

for the faint enigma. Lick it, your tongue

buds an estuary. Cast, it will bob

the equinox deep into English

etymologies: grig and girn and groin...

Watch it running on a playing field

with others of the inner city, picked on,

nicknamed, yellowed to a cartoon brat.

Or beneath the hundred thousand crosses

left by men who could never spell

themselves, imagine it grinning from their skulls

or groaning in the pelvic bones of women

who bore it, a surge from this serpent bend

of the river into every green corner.