How I Learned to hold grief at such a young age - Kinsale Drake
Lawrence Robinson
Lrobpoet at sonic.net
Tue Jun 10 05:55:56 PDT 2025
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
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