Grandmother Poem

Grandmother by William McIlvanney By the time I knew my nanna she was dead. Before that she was where I thought she stood, Spectacles, slippers, venerable head, A standard-issue galvanising arc in her eyes Familiar stage-props of grandmotherhood. It took her death to tutor me they were lies. My sixteen-year-old cognisance was shocked To hear her family narrate her old In quiet nostalgic chorus. As they talked Her body stiffened on the obtuse fast Though well water-washed linen coverlet of her bed. The kitchen where we sat, a way I knew, Took on a strangeness with for individu all in ally one word they said. How she was born where wealth was pennies, grew Into a woman onwards she was a girl, From dirt and pain constructed happiness, caducous youths dreams in the fierce sweat of a mill, Married and mothered in her sixteenth year, Fed children from her own babble outs emptiness In an attic rats owned half of, trust her beer. Careless, they scattere d pictures: mother, wife, Strikes lived through, hard concessions bought and sold In a level-headed negotiate with life, Told anecdotes in which her strength rang gold, Her eyes were clear, her wants as plain as salt. The past became a mint from which they struck Sm each change till that means glittered like a vault.

The the Great Compromiser in the other room became to me Awesome as pharaoh now, as if one look Would show me all that I had failed to see. The kitchen became museum in my sight, Sacred as church. These were the very chairs In which her gnarled gravitas grew frail. Her hard-won pride had kept these brasses brig ht. Her tireless errands were etched upon ! the stairs. A vase shone in the sun, holy as grail. I wanted to bring others to this room, dictate its nothing else than this that people mean. A place to which humility can come, A wrested niche where no one else has been won from the wastes of broken worlds and worse. Here we can stay, stupid and false, of course. Themselves to the living is all we have to give. Let...If you want to get a full essay, invest it on our website: BestEssayCheap.com

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