Tuesday Poem: "Ruby's Magic"

"You can live too long," my grandmother says

and, hovering in the wings of her hundredth year,

few know it better than she.

Her body is a framework of sparrow bones

encaging the heart of a lion,

a heart that stirs with savage music in mutiny to her wishes.

A life lived in service is loath to become a burden.

My mother, steeped in a mantle of Irish Catholicism, says

it rattles her faith to see Grandmother

visited by torments she does not deserve.

My father who loves her like his own mother

remembers her as a woman who lived without complaint

now that physical pain and mental anguish

drive her beyond her character.

My aunts are two sides of a triangle weakened by the third,

playing down the struggle that ages them too soon

and plying her with love to ease the bitter passage

to the banks of the Styx.

And I, her grandson, with a throat full of lumps

and a head full of happier times,

look at my grandmother not as a rheumy-eyed woman

with thin hair and threadbare skin,

but the grandma I shared a room with,

standing true as the kauri of her house

before her mirror at bedtime.

Her fingers not gnarled but deft as they unleashed

a cascade of thick, white tresses

and the sparkle in her eye as she told me stories

to the rhythm of her brushstrokes.

As a child, my grandmother had magic and mana to me,

and no matter how fate and time erode her,

nothing can strip the magic from our hearts.

The poet wishes to acknowledge The National Poetry Foundation (UK) in whose anthology this poem first appeared.