30 poems in 30 days: Day 13

What it takes to write a poem to the Grandmother who never much liked you.
Song Lyrics by Gladys Johnson at age 12


Her eyes squint, cautious to engage
In the car she reads the words on billboards
Spells them out loud

The leaves are falling off the trees
And that means that you’re leaving me
Oh why can’t the summer stay on?

She sings us songs made in her youth
(I realize I don’t know where she grew up)
Teaches my sister to play cribbage
Curses the winter, and the dogs.

It’s hard to be a child around someone so lonely

The birds have left
They’ve all flown south
And that means that I’m left to myself
Oh why can’t the summer stay on?


They wrote it on a walk home, she tells us.
Her hands are cold,
she wears gloves in the air conditioning.
Fidgets with her glasses.
Doesn’t say my grandfather’s name.

Things crack,
I think,
when someone dies.

When I’m with you,
I feel so gay,
How could you be thinking
Of going away
Away

(Two aways)

She calls my father “Bobby”
Can’t tell if she’s full
Or filled

Sometimes she forgets she’s sad.
I want to tell her;
Poems are good places to hide your prayers.
But I don’t think she knows who I am,
and I wonder if it’s a relief
when you’ve always been that lonely,
to forget what feeling is,
to forget what time the train would come,
or the color you wore on your 10th anniversary.