Time for another tidbit from my new book, Away. This week’s post contains a poem from section three about my grandmother. Section three centers around grief and the ways in which honest mourning is another way to fall deeper into love, even through the unanswerable questions surrounding death and eternity.
Loss always brings change. Along with grieving the losses of faith and community during the pandemic, I was grieving the loss of my grandmother, who passed away in 2020. Mike and I moved into her house that summer with the memories. The world as I knew it was crumbling around me, and processing my grief over the loss of Grandma helped me process all my grief. “Hands” is about the eternality of love, which I hope is heaven, unbounded by space and time.
Hands
I have my grandmother’s hands.
When three new age spots
appear below my left index finger –
like a moon and two stars
out of the blue gray sky
of early night,
I smile.
I remember her hands,
the ridges and veins of ninety-two years,
left pinky crooked outward,
covered in a carpet of faint brown stars.
She was a potter.
I can see the wet, gray clay
squish through those hands –
held steady against the spinning wheel,
leaving something perfect.
Like this cup I hold
on this cold morning.
My newly-spotted hands
cradle the smooth
curves her hands formed.
As the night sky develops
on my own skin, I might get to see her
fade in through the years
on our hands.
Our long, boney, elegant,
intergalactic hands.
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