Your Grandmother’s Bible

At night, you read your grandmother’s bible,
worn and bare-backed, it sits on the old Philco
that once belonged to your grandfather.

The print is small, and cluttered with a lifetime of notes.
The language is archaic, yet beautiful.
For you, it is less spiritual than poetry,

less spiritual than a connection
to those who live within you and yet somehow
are gone, consumed by a life well lived.

There were finer things to claim when it came time
to empty the house she had lived in so long, choices
that likely would have made more sense,

but nothing else sang to you. Nothing else cried out
from the eight rooms of what had been her life.
This old bible was enough.

And so you read. Just a bit. Night after night
for decades after her death, filling your mind
with her spirit before you sleep, and hoping

somehow
some of it
sticks.

About this poem

The picture really is my grandmother’s bible. My mom’s mom. It really does sit next to my bed on an old Philco radio that was my grandfather’s (My Dad’s Dad). Two of my favorite people. Silly perhaps, but it is a way of keeping them close.

Tom