Poem: In My Grandmother’s Trunk I Found

Wrote a poem today.

I'm taking an online class for writing parts of our lives into story -- finding the stories in our lives. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, yet I am surprised, the prompts and discussion, and the writing itself, are invoking waves of emotion, unexpressed but unsuppressed, so my demeanour no doubt has sorrow in it.

The background to this is that sleep has been REALLY bad this week, and I’m stressed over my very complicated housing subsidy re-application. Combine that with the unexpected vulnerability in class, and you get this poem.

The prompt was "In my Grandmother’s Trunk I Found."

I like it when a poem offers itself so willingly like this. It just tumbled out, each line prompting the next, an entirely inner-audio experience. I hear the prompt, I hear the response, I write the response, I hear the response to that.

In my Grandmother’s Trunk I Found

a small and suffering sound

and when that sound awoke

I began to choke

and when that sound unfurled

it gave to me the world

and when the world I saw

it held my old gran-ma

It reminds me of an Irish poem I knew as a kid. My poem is nowhere near as magical, but the shifts are similarly odd and when I first reread mine I could feel the tempo of this Irish verse romping with the words. Here is the poem, recited to me by the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem many years ago.

The Man of Double Deed

There was a man of double deed
Who sowed his garden full of seed,
When the seed began to grow,
'Twas like a garden full of snow.
When the snow began to fall,
Like birds it was upon a wall,
When the birds began to fly,
'Twas like a shipwreck in the sky.
When the sky began to crack,
'Twas like a stick upon my back.
When my back began to smart,
'Twas like a pen knife in my heart.
And when my heart began to bleed,
Then I was dead, and dead indeed.

Image: of my granma, standing against snow and bushes, a white woman in a tight winter cap, short leather jacket, gloves, and bomber pants, with knee high boots. She stands with hand on a bent thigh and is a thousand times cooler than ever since. See adjoining pictures for comparison. (Two young ladies — Marie-Louise before she was Granma and her best friend, Bernadette) in baggie dresses and hats. Granma’s is a bit big and a bit floppy.) Final image is headshot of granma in her 90s.

of birds in flight: "Birds flying at sun set" by Kingaustin07, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.