How I Learned to hold grief at such a young age - Kinsale Drake

[Lawrence Robinson]

How I Learned to hold grief at such a young age


And she didn’t know how to hold her grief 
	so she let it break
Like waves against the inside of her skin 
	until it was all worn
Down trying to hold her together and she only wanted
My baby older sister to remember grandpa 
	as a happy man,
A man who stuck out his bum playing 
	basketball, who told
Jokes so bad my Navajo grandma would 
	scold him, and kiss him
and make him coffee in that blue kettle 
	their old house
still has somewhere, maybe under the 
	cabinets, or behind
that old flour tin that had maggots one year 
	when my mom
was helping her mom, my scary Navajo 
	grandma, clean it out
and they managed by some Navajo miracle 
	to keep the spam
& eggs from burning on the stove the entire 
	time & I remember too
how my grandmother had a picture of her 
	husband up
until the day she died and even now it’s still 
	there in that house
& how my mother has learned to say hello 
	to the photographs
and clear the gardens every few weeks, and 
	lick her wounds
and somehow make sure we’re never too 
	sad about it,
don’t ever be sad, because they were good people,
great people, in fact, and they never would 
	have said that
sort of thing out loud while they lived, and 
	that is important
to remember because that is exactly the 
	kind of good
that they were, that we were from since the 
	very
beginning

	- Kinsale Drake
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sonic.net/pipermail/poetrylovers/attachments/20250610/aa5146d3/attachment.htm>