For my deceased grandmother June 2007

A young child with a father and mother, with brothers and sisters who loved her;
Then a young girl of sixteen, with wings wishing and dreaming soon she will meet her lover
A bride at twenty; her heart leaping and remembering her wedding vows;
Now at 25, she has a young of her own, securing and providing for them a happy home.
Thirty then forty, her sons are now all grown and gown;
At fifty babies played around her knees, I played around her knees.
Now she is an old lady sitting outside under a maple tree. Every evening she participates in the yellow sunset and evening air; munching on a gum, which she really liked. You could see it in the way she gave herself to it.
Every sun rise her and her old man sat under the blue sky drinking the brewed coffee and reading the closed book, which she thought was open. The routine of her life made her blind to the reality; it made her nights long and deep. She felt her hands were tied and her mouth bound.
It was august and she lost her bloom. Her fingers looked bone white and wrinkled, her mouth needed whipping, and her tongue stopped shaping words, her hair all white, swirly and long. Her old man talked around her, and then night set in.
She had nowhere to go; life to her seemed no crystal stair and no carpets on the floor. Her body lied in bed covered by a few inches of sheet pointed south by southwest. People all go this way, the future so unclear they stumble into it like children crossing the street.