Grandmothers

Grandmothers are on the radio

remembering

the times they had already made into cakes,

when they had darned socks, married, had kids

against the curtained backdrops of what they

wrote about. The world around them

weaving through them was

what they became known for,

their wisdom dispensed in sherry glass

sizes – mothball asides back then, dusty;

musty nowadays when our legends live with

living legends, not all dead white men. 

And now, who would not thank these weavers

of lost voices that bring us to the village of

living elders, taking tea on the radio?

Who would not thank them, except

the dead or lost boys not grown up yet

who wouldn’t have payed attention to how

she cross-stitched or did anything much anyway,

as they would never have wanted to know her

like we do. These same ones by the radio listening

for their mothers and grandmothers, crying

for a bedtime story of their histories when she may

have told them already, only hers. It’s then we

remember bicycles and broken shells, spaces

we could claim have always been - fields of white, 

purple, gold and green.

Lily

You were my heraldic fleur-de-lis
but the dictionary says
you were a large trumpet
shaped flower,
bulbous,
that you lived
lily-livered
on a tall stem,
gloomy.

You still send three petalled
messages to me;
in your coat,
in your arms,
the pure white
of freshly baked rolls.

15 years old, 1939, White cliffs of Dover, on a ferry dressed as Heidi, Man in Nazi uniform on the train also in disguise. Both on the deck of the ferry...story.