Today is her birthday.
She was precise in the proportions of things,
Her eyes and hands the weights and measures
Of having to make do with what could be made.
Her dresses were the same remembered pattern;
Recipes a private code of smidgens and dashes,
Times and temperatures never minutes or degrees
But a certain knowing of what looked and felt done.
In the Fall, the dark dirt cellar would light up,
Little by little, with bright reds and greens and
Yellows of what she was canning for the winter,
Her garden harvest sealed tight in glass jars.
I stood at the foot of her hospital bed, there
Where her life dripped slowly away, preserved
In a different jar . . . a color I would not name;
And I told her the lie I needed us to believe.
But her eyes knew the final measure of her life.
Come Spring, each and all these years later,
I'll go to the ground that tends her now, take her
Not fancy florist flowers but whatever I find
Growing in the pasture, sunflowers perhaps;
Harvest as carefully, gratefully as she once did
And take them to her in an old Mason jar . . .
I think she knows she taught me something.
Poetry by countryfog
Read 396 times
Written on 2011-01-08 at 14:11
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Elegy For My Grandmother
Perhaps because she had so little to wasteShe was precise in the proportions of things,
Her eyes and hands the weights and measures
Of having to make do with what could be made.
Her dresses were the same remembered pattern;
Recipes a private code of smidgens and dashes,
Times and temperatures never minutes or degrees
But a certain knowing of what looked and felt done.
In the Fall, the dark dirt cellar would light up,
Little by little, with bright reds and greens and
Yellows of what she was canning for the winter,
Her garden harvest sealed tight in glass jars.
I stood at the foot of her hospital bed, there
Where her life dripped slowly away, preserved
In a different jar . . . a color I would not name;
And I told her the lie I needed us to believe.
But her eyes knew the final measure of her life.
Come Spring, each and all these years later,
I'll go to the ground that tends her now, take her
Not fancy florist flowers but whatever I find
Growing in the pasture, sunflowers perhaps;
Harvest as carefully, gratefully as she once did
And take them to her in an old Mason jar . . .
I think she knows she taught me something.
Poetry by countryfog
Read 396 times
Written on 2011-01-08 at 14:11
Save as a bookmark (requires login) Write a comment (requires login) Send as email (requires login) Print text
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