It's just poetry, it won't bite

Not Entirely Becoming Grandma


11.01.12 Posted in words to linger on by

KJ Hannah Greenberg’s most recent poem to appear here was Fifty Is Years Old Enough (September 2012).

Not Entirely Becoming Grandma
By KJ Hannah Greenberg

Purple and white cardboard frames the face, grown on a matron,
Escaped from Europe’s World War II ravages, while prepubescent.
Seasons spent sewing coat buttons, in Garment District circumstances,
Wrought changes in eyesight, compromised dexterity; her swollen
Hands hold her spectacles, her shoulders steel against autonomy.

When the camera captured her light, she wore wrinkles,
Pendulant breasts, straying hair, a too-long housedress.
“Shifts,” she called those shirtwaist comforts of cotton,
While ironing, simmering, peeling oh-so-many green apples,
Nurturing her generations as taught by her imagination.

Whereas I grew up with friends, pets, family, worked calculus,
French, later rhetoric plus sociology, “taxed” myself over scholarship,
My cookpots too brewed motherly tastes and worries. My laundry,
Like flags, fluttered or not on warmer days. Though my body, like Gram’s
Touched temporal gravity, events’ graveness, hers drooped loosely. 





Comments are closed.

Latest Podcast Episode
0:00
0:00
vox poetica archives