Poetry

Grandma

Grandma! Grandma!

So great to see you,

your candy-floss hair like a cloud,

your hands powdered with flour,

no preaching or bitching from you!

Grandma, Grandma,

your eyes powder-blue,

your skirt like a circus - so round and so true,

I run to your moth-poison hugs,

but can't make my way through -

I stumble and break the taboo,

Grandma, Grandma, is it really you?

Your bosom throbs speaking of truth,

my Daddy, that bastard, that null -

- anytime I see him, I hear you,

Your perfectionist voice in the room,

like a curtain wrapped around a stool,

and he popped right out of the blue,

to shatter all your eugenic views-

- Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through?

Grandma, you're not dead, are you?

I read about you in papers at school,

you were born in nineteen-thirty-two,

had fair hair, your eyes powder-blue

gave me hot milk when I screamed for you.

And I brought my first poems to you,

knelt before your chair as now I do

and prayed to the Colossus, eyes bedewed

with love that made me part of you.

Am I not true?

Your blood runs in my veins, it's true,

and inside me your weary heart grew,

The war, Nazis, bees swarming in you,

Golden bees against sky so blue,

A bloody finger and a purple wound,

Grandma, I'm cursed with loving you,

You're my ghost in a black fur,

And your words in me pop and bloom,

like tulips in your garden, my doom,

and I'm destined never to be through -

- However hard I try to hate you,

your typewriter scent will pursue

my head, empty like a big glass bulb,

filled only with a message from you,

Grandma, you're not dead, are you?

Maria Kardel