Grandmother

Written by Kathleen Wade

Inspiration

I was born long after my grandmother died, so I did not know her personally, I'm sorry to say. But I came to love her through the stories my father and his siblings told about her, and she has always been an inspiration to me. I offer this poem as a "snapshot" of my grandmother, who wove her fierceness, nurturance and playfulness into a complicated blend of Inspired Mother.

Who paid your way to America
after the famine scattered your brothers
to New York, St. Louis, Chicago?
Who hired you to cook and clean, until
you fell in love with the railroad man
who loved you but also loved his drink?

In homes you never owned,
you birthed two girls, then my father,
then two more boys.
Take yourselves down to the train yard,
you'd say in your Irish brogue,
and pick up a bit o'coal that's dropped from the cars,
or there'll be no heat in this house a-tall..
In the scrappy neighborhood of Lower Price Hill,
you chased down bullies with a stick,
took in assorted cats,
dressed your girls in bows,
made mutton stew,
and ruled the neighborhood
as champion bean-bag thrower.
You were my father's queen, singing him
Gaelic songs, passing on superstitions,
laughing at loss, saving him
from your husband's rage.

Before your oldest was twenty
and your youngest ten, you faded from them,
a kidney disease no one talked about.

I see your face fierce as a bulldog, your piercing eyes,
your short, athletic frame in some of my cousins,
a sibling, a few of my nieces. I have stood
in the Galway cottage where you
and nine brothers and sisters were born,
smelled the peat smoldering in the oven,
touched the dirt floor where you took your first step.

You have left a legacy of questions,
lingering melancholy, a keen eye.
"Tell me about your mother," I used to ask,
and your sons would fall into reverie, painting
a picture of you on Wilder Street,
the sun against your back, undefeated.

As Executive Director of Women Writing for (a) Change in Cincinnati, Ohio, Kathy Wade is responsible for the administrative operations and faculty leadership. She is a teacher and writer in the semester courses in the adult program. Kathy also designs and facilitates workshops, and consults with individual writers. An Associate of the Ohio Writing Project, Kathy has conducted writing workshops for teachers in the Bay Area and in Cincinnati. She has 29 years experience as a teacher of writing and English from junior high through college. Her poetry has appeared in Ohio Teachers Write, Plymouth Writers Group, and Cincinnati Neighborhood Poet Laureate anthologies. A collection of interviews: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives, was published in 2005. She holds a BA from Edgecliff College and a MEd from the University of Cincinnati. She is a 2008 graduate of the Feminist Leadership Academy. Kathy lives with her husband, Forrest Brandt, also a writer, in Cincinnati.