On April 1 I started responding to daily prompts from TWO SYLVIAS WEBSITE. My goal to write a poem each day in answer to the prompts sent out on email to me at the dawn of each day.
This is a poem I wrote in response to one asking me to speak in the poem as an inanimate object or as a person no longer alive. The Pandemic has made me think more of my grandmother who died in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. And again it was her voice that I suddenly assumed in writing the poem I print below.
MY GRANDMOTHER'S PANDEMIC, CIRCA 1918
Norman’s girl, you came as a child with my daughter Grace.
To clean my stone, plant flowers and wonder aloud
At my death and my mother’s just a week apart.
We were victims of the Spanish Flu.
Now you have your own pandemic.
A century later. Did you know
That I was a friend of your Irish grandmother?
Jane hated the mill, the whistle, the bobbins
Spinning and the frenzy of the doffers,
Running from machine to throbbing machine.
She had known only calm Lough Neagh waters
Lapping the shore where she played.
.
She would sit watching her mother
Untangle the lines that the fishermen
Her father and brothers would set
And bait to catch eels; barrels of them
Wriggling and writhing in a dark
Silvery mass loaded on wagons
And taken to Cookstown. Mill owner's cousin,
I was hired to train the girls new from Ireland.
They knew I had a
soft spot for the Irish.
My first husband-
God rest his soul-
Made me Ida Lynch
for a short happy
time: I loved his laughing through tears way.
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