Grandfather

This is for anyone who has studied an old photograph and wished they really knew the person behind the face.

Grandfather

All I have is a poem, twenty-one stanzas
Written in a language I never learned,
And a few old letters addressed to you
In the old farmhouse at Rural Route 2;
My eye carries you yet, decades ago,
Sitting in the dim lit evening, reading
By the pallid fluorescent lights, you were
Resting from a day’s hard work on the land,
Silent in your black vest, iron gray hair
Thinning, fingers turning the pages of
Israel my Glory.

Your smile and your voice are absent in my
Memory, but then, you never spoke to me,
Youngest of too many to remember,
You were tired and I was just another
Daughter, born into a man’s religion,
Born to be the lesser one, but once, once,
You looked at me. I still remember that
Glance, and I wonder what you were thinking;
Maybe nothing; maybe you were writing
This poem in your head and didn’t see me.
I know what that’s like.

I read those old letters the other day,
The ones addressed to you, and I wished I
Could hear your voice in the echo of ink,
Dragging your mind out into air for me,
But your words have gone the way of all breath;
Maybe that’s why you liked silence, but I,
I want your missing words, for I saw by
The faded replies of a friend long dead
That you had questions, a lot of questions,
About God, about death, about belief,
And what it means to live.

I wonder if you have the answers now
On those streets you believed in, golden streets
Welcoming another son of the earth.
And I? I left your world where it lay, fields
Yielding to grassland again, I left its
Religion and its waiting for heaven,
But I think we’re more alike, you and I,
Than we know, for I think we both know the
Darkness that only lifts by writing, and
How questions lose their edge when fingers touch
The heartbeat of earth.

All I have is a poem, twenty-one stanzas
Born from the land, and a pen, and questions,
Written with language I don’t understand;
In the golding autumn I think of you,
This man I never knew, and in the light
Of evening I write, as a silent night
Shadows this earth-land, and I realize
You left me something; your questions linger
In my blood and in my language, they are
Waiting, with me and you and another
Man I never knew.

-s. rochelle