Most read ▸
Ndrek Gjini
I am not the black cat.
There were four of us;
my grandmother,
a black cat,
a myth,
and I.
My grandmother often
told us a myth.
When you are ill, she said,
if a black cat
comes and sits on your bed
it means that you
will die soon.
I was only six,
seriously ill.
Our black cat
This lovely flower fell to seed;
Work gently, sun and rain;
She held it as her dying creed
That she would grow again.
Afterwards, the air came cheap,
new wants sleeping at the breast.
Grandmothers in the bush for a good time,
the post-it note read.
It might take fifty years for the waves
to turn clear glass cloudy white,
unmistakable as platinum blond hair
in photos from 1936 when Grandma Dagmar
looked like Jean Harlow as she discarded
broken milk bottles that I might find
and piece together into a ghost or new moon.
My grandmother had a true calendar,
a meaningful, eventful one.
“You were born four moons
after the heavy flooding
which killed half of the town,
twelve moons before
the communists dynamited the church.
It was just two moons after
the grapes were ripened,”
she used to say to me.
As a child, until I began school,
I knew nothing of the fact
that I was born on 1st October, 1963.
If I tell you my birthday
with the current calendar,
I tell you nothing about myself.
have all been written down, but still
she has trouble working the TV. She calls
me up to say the device has turned itself off
again, and could I come over and turn it
back on? Just look at the notes Nana,
I say. I wrote the instructions down for you.
It’s a similar story with the microwave,
with its buttons seemingly designed to
perplex her. The internet is a true enigma.
I just don’t know how to manage, now
that he’s gone. The place is just so big,
so empty. And the bills, she says. Michael
used to sort the bills – now I don’t know
what to do. I try to assure her that all is OK,
all is in order, the electricity won’t run out,
the hot water won’t suddenly go cold.
My Puritan Grandmother! — I see her now,
With placid brow,
Always so sure
"That no things but the right things shall endure !"
Sombrely neat, so orderly and prim,
Always a little grim.
Austere but kind. . . .
Smooth-banded hair and smoothly-banded mind.
But let me whisper it to you today —
I know it now —
That deep in her there was a flame at play.
Beneath that brow
The blue-grey eyes sought beauty, found it too
Most often by the ocean's passionate blue.
Her sea-beach treasures — shells and coloured weed
Gathered and hoarded with glad human greed —
“Well! The red currants must be picked to-day.
They’re ready for jelly” Grandmother would say.
She never wasted words yet had her way.
In cool gray cotton gown, and black straw hat
Securely tied--She made a point of that
Though no breeze stirred the lilacs where she sat
To superintend old Jock and Marie Anne
At tasks of picking. When her palm-leaf fan
Waved slowly all was well; but my blood ran
Quicker when it moved very fast ... one knew
The hours were slipping past ... then old Jock too
And Marie Anne, would pick with greater zest.
“Granny! Red currant jelly’s much the best!”
“Black’s best for colds” she’d say, as she caressed
With firm kind fingers my rough curly head.
We sat in front of the fire;
Grandmother was in the rocking chair doing her knitting
And Little Brother and I were lying down flat.
“Please tell us a story, Grandmother,” we said.
But she put her head on one side and began counting the stitches,
“Suppose you tell me one instead.”
I made up one about a spotted tiger
That had a knot in his tail;
But though I liked this about the knot,
I did not know why it was put there.
So I said: “Little Brother’s turn.”
“I know a perfect story,” he cried, waving his hands.
Grandmother laid down her knitting.
“Do tell us, dear.”
“Once upon a time there was a bad little girl
And her Mummy gave her the slipper, and that’s all.”
In the middle of our porridge plates
There was a blue butterfly painted
And each morning we tried who should reach the butterfly first.
Then the Grandmother said: “Do not eat the poor butterfly.”
That made us laugh.
Always she said it and always it started us laughing.
It seemed such a sweet little joke.
I was certain that one fine morning
The butterfly would fly out of the plates,
Laughing the teeniest laugh in the world,
And perch on the Grandmother’s lap.
When it was Grandmother Barbara's day,
We lived on a hill, and down below,
Beyond the pasture and the trees,
A river used to go.
The water was very wide and blue
And deep, and my! it was a sight
To see the ships go up and down,
And all the sails were white.
And Grandmother Barbara used to wait
Beside the window or the door.
She never was too tired of it
To watch the river any more.
And we could hardly see across,
And the water was blue, as blue as the sky,
And all day long and all day long
We watched the little ships go by.
When Grandmother comes to our house,
She sits in the chair and sews away.
She cuts some pieces just alike
And makes a quilt all day.
I watch her bite the little thread,
Or stick the needle in and out,
And then she remembers her grandmother's house,
And what her grandmother told about,
And how a very long ago--
She tells it while she cuts and strips--
We used to live in Mary-land,
And there was a water with ships.
But that was long before her day,
She says, and so I like to stand
Beside her chair, and then I ask,
"Please tell about in Mary-land."