A story poem I wrote a long time ago. #NationalPoetryMonth
Love, Our Subject In the multitude of cells now stretching and dividing In my womb I carry the genetic memories of my grandmother, running from her mountain cabin in the snow when her husband confessed his infidelity. Her shoes were not good; the slush soaked through and cold numbed her toes. She walked back and sat by the stove until spring. Our child may inherit her pretty white feet and her knack for jotting witty verse about tiny purple wild flowers and uncut green grass in Sierra foothills. She also penned longer benedictions to a freckled and brown-haired man in soft flannel shirts for whom she washed sheets and baked bread. On stormy winter nights as she wrote in her journal he read Jefferson and Paine. He voted Democrat and sent two sons to war to fight for freedom first against the Nazi threat then the red menace. When the first boy suffocated in a fire in the sky above France she cried alone in the bath tub then emerged to massage the graying temples of her husband, the father, whose suppressed tears of sorrow and guilt poisoned eyes and sinuses and made his head throb. She never wrote the word democracy in her journal, though she’d heard it often enough, mentioned proudly in eulogy as they handed her the folded flag that had draped her first born’s coffin. She kept the hand stitched banner in her top drawer under a black satin night gown now too small for sagging breasts. Love was her subject because love creates life as solid as the dark ink flowing from her pen as sweet as the smell of her bread baking on a warm October afternoon as tangible as a silver plane forged by women during the war so heavy with potential joy and sorrow, who would believe it could fly? Photo by Leio McLaren at Unsplash
Beautiful Pietry
Thanks, Dick!
Hello.
Beautiful poem! Thank you for sharing it with us.
You’re so welcome! Thank you for reading!