Best Grandfather Poems

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
...

How neatly a cat sleeps,
sleeps with its paws and its posture,
sleeps with its wicked claws,
and with its unfeeling blood,
...

In my dream,
drilling into the marrow
of my entire bone,
my real dream,
...

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
...

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
...

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
...

Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road--long bamboo huts
Noplace to shit but sand channel ruts
...

Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead) , grand-
fathers (both dead) , brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st and 2nd) , nieces, and nephews.They stare
...

'Angels of the love affair, do you know that other,
the dark one, that other me? '

1. ANGEL OF FIRE AND GENITALS
...

He was as old as my grandfather and I, just twelve.
Marriage meant nothing to me, not even a new cheeram.
He lived in penance and I, just a little child, tended the aashram,
Never cared for, not even acknowledged of my existence.
...

For a Child of 1918

My grandfather said to me
as we sat on the wagon seat,
...

Write down !
I am an Arab
And my identity card number is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth will come after a summer
Will you be angry?
...

A single rose with thorny stem
On mother nature`s tattered hem
Which no-one cares to steal away
So left to wither and decay
...

it's 1962 March 28th
I'm sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
night is falling
I never knew I liked
...

Old leaves have no defence against the wind.
A gray hawk is October's inner cry.
The bells of Salem church play elegies.
Distance becomes a single snowflake's fall.
...

............sitting here in the stillness
.............................staring
...............staring out the window
...at darkness my friend and my foe.
...

She taught me what her uncle once taught her:
How easily the biggest coal block split
If you got the grain and the hammer angled right.
...

He’s active as quicksilver,
Ageless as the sun,
Agile as a stream,
And alert as a bird in springtime.
...

Portate bien,
behave yourself you always said to me.
I behaved myself
when others were warm in winter
...

"Sit in my hand."
I'm ten.
I can't see him,
but I hear him breathing
...

[Brazil. A friend of the writer is speaking.]


Half squatter, half tenant (no rent)—
...

Even if our hearts were as strong as a storm, we'd still feel a little bit sad
Knowing that we've lost our grandfather, our friend, our dad.
For so many years, we've felt their presence
In so many ways, we've felt complete,
...

Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to
lead it,
But there comes a day when your eyes
are all right but your arm isn't long
...

When in the large compartment,
Everyone was seated.
And all the luggage loaded,
The family group completed.
...

Grandfather, Grandfather,
what do pandas say?
Grandfather, Grandfather,
as among the rocks they roll
...

As I stood in the courtyard
Of my ancestral house in Palakkad;
A sweet-scented breeze blew,
On my face, touching, caressing my whole being
...

Fighting for freedom,
Fall of a valiant soldier
Resting in the Lord
...

Long and winding road
with patches and holes
The holes which sometimes
turned into small ponds,
...

Who was frightened by a Passing Motor, and was brought to Reason

"Oh murder! What was that, Papa!"
"My child, It was a Motor-Car,
...

A lone cypress
In my grandfather's lawn
Standing tall and erect
Since I could sense life about me
...

I know, or I think I know, where I was born.
New Plymouth, a city with two sprawling cemeteries,
where I found my grandparents' gravestones at last,
but they were covered in gray lichen and moss.
...

A wind's word, the Hebrew Hallelujah.
I wonder they never gave it to a boy
(Hal for short) boy with wind-wild hair.
It means Praise God, as well it should since praise
...

My mother’s brother’s sister’s name is Grace
She’s my aunt and likes to go from place to place
My mother’s sister’s brother’s name is Brad
He’s my uncle and he is my cousin’s Dad
...

I.
And Willy, my eldest-born, is gone, you say, little Anne?
Ruddy and white, and strong on his legs, he looks like a man.
And Willy's wife has written: she never was over-wise,
...

Cursed!
be the father of the bride
of the blacksmith who forged the iron for the axe
with which the woodsman hacked down the oak
...

They said he sent his love to me,
They wouldn't put it in my hand,
And when I asked them where it was
They said I couldn't understand.
...

My grand-father's clock was too large for the shelf,
So it stood ninety years on the floor;
It was taller by half than the old man himself,
Though it weighed not a penny weight more.
...

BOOK I

Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide
...

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
...

THE Argonauts now stemm'd the foaming tide,
And to Arcadia's shore their course apply'd;
Where sightless Phineus spent his age in grief,
But Boreas' sons engage in his relief;
...

Inside many of us
is a small old man
who wants to get out.
No bigger than a two-year-old
...

I'll tell you an old-fashioned story
That Grandfather used to relate,
Of a joiner and building contractor;
'Is name, it were Sam Oglethwaite.
...

"How shall I be a poet?
How shall I write in rhyme?
You told me once 'the very wish
Partook of the sublime.'
...

Hiding in the hay
me a terrified little boy
& my uncle like a terrified little boy
...

Father God, I come to you again this morning to ask for your
help. Lord one of poem hunters precious writers David Harris
is in a hospital bed after having several small strokes. I thank
you Father for not allowing the big one to touch him.
...

where was heaven?
when my father died,
with tears in my eyes i cried,
...

Axe-fall, echo and silence. Noonday silence.
Two miles from here, it is the twentieth century:
cars on the bitumen, powerlines vaulting the farms.
Here, with my axe, I am chopping into the stillness.
...

Hi, when you are near towards us
In this amazing horizon,
Light has scattered in the atmosphere,
Your original face is creamed
...

O I forbid you, maidens a',
That wear gowd on your hair,
To come or gae by Carterhaugh,
For young Tam Lin is there.
...

Along the strand stones,
busted shells, wood scraps,
bottle tops, dimpled
and stainless beer cans.
...

My new, rustic kitchen table,
Swallows completely my turbulent state,
I feel calm like the ocean's near stillness,
As it holds its breath and waits
...

When my great-grandfather,
Ebeneezer Williams was eleven
years old, he was herding a dozen
cattle from one mountain area
...

While sitting on a park bench reading
I overheard a man nearby
talking with his grandson.
...

Sing me a thrush, bone.
Sing me a nest of cup and pestle.
Sing me a sweetbread fr an old grandfather.
...

When the Lieutenant of the Guardia de Asalto
heard the automatic go off, he turned
and took the second shot just above
the sternum, the third tore away
...

Kind Sir: This is an old game
that we played when we were eight and ten.
Sometimes on The Island, in down Maine,
...

The hanging grandfather clock
Always says five to eleven
The pendulum is holding slightly to the right
I don't even remember how it sounds anymore
...

''In my youth, '' commenced the old man,
''I have encountered so many things'',
''And of course, I was highly imbued'',
''With feelings of love and joy''.
...

Tiny keyboard bearing the massive reverie of the past—
press one button, we're carried away on a country road,
marching with saints, leaving the Red River Valley...
...

[Scene, the 'Snuggery' at Tappington.-- Grandpapa in a high-backed cane-bottomed elbow-chair of carved walnut-tree, dozing; his nose at an angle of forty-five degrees,--his thumbs slowly perform the rotatory motion described by lexicographers as 'twiddling.'--The 'Hope of the family' astride on a walking-stick, with burnt-cork mustachios, and a pheasant's tail pinned in his cap, solaceth himself with martial music.-- Roused by a strain of surpassing dissonance, Grandpapa Loquitur. ]

Come hither, come hither, my little boy Ned!
Come hither unto my knee--
...

...
my memory's screen door opens to the stars;
there's my Grandfather in the yard
gazing up at the constellations
...

Oh, Mulligan's bar was the deuce of a place
To drink, and to fight, and to gamble and race;
The height of choice spirits from near and from far
Were all concentrated on Mulligan's bar.
...

The family story tells, and it was told true,
of my great-grandfather who begat eight
genius children and bought twelve almost-new
...

A PASTORAL BALLAD

THE fields which with covetous spirit we sold,
Those beautiful fields, the delight of the day,
...

.
Congratulations! ! !
You are Graduating from College! ! !
We celebrate your graduation
...

The Spring is come, and Spring flowers coming too,
The crocus, patty kay, the rich hearts' ease;
The polyanthus peeps with blebs of dew,
...

The yellowed diary's notes whisper in vernacular.
They sound the forgotten posture,
the cramped cry that forces me to hear that voice.
Now I stumble back in your black-paged wake.
...

You got your seat
Without any drop of sweat
Relied on your grandfather
Your namesake
...

A drifting, April, twilight sky,
A wind which blew the puddles dry,
And slapped the river into waves
That ran and hid among the staves
...

I was still a little girl
When my grandfather taught me
How to care and till our land
To produce the vital things
...

Canny has always been an Irish word
to my ear, so too its cousin crafty,
suggesting not only an appreciation of close-work,
fine-making, handwrought artistry,
...

A man roams the streets with a basket
of freestone peaches hollering, "Peaches,
peaches, yellow freestone peaches for sale."
...

Daughter like wine you have grown to be my fine girl
You have grown wings to enable you patch on the tallest branch
You are now a woman; daughter remember?
Under my wings you no longer hide
...

REMEMBER all those renowned generations,
They left their bodies to fatten the wolves,
They left their homesteads to fatten the foxes,
Fled to far countries, or sheltered themselves
...

Bones ache, sleep evades…
Oh, grandfather clock strikes twelve;
Someone snores next door.
Its same time, but different strokes
...

I wake up everyday
Before the alarm clock
Jolts everybody awake
Ahead of the roosters
...

(A tribute to William Burns)
(from the archives)

As I opened my history book, began
...

All afternoon my father drove the country roads
between Detroit and Lansing. What he was looking for
I never learned, no doubt because he never knew himself,
though he would grab any unfamiliar side road
...

1922: the stone porch of my Grandfather’s summer house
I
“I won’t go with you. I want to stay with Grandpa!”
That’s how I threw cold water
...

The phone’s just rung: ‘Hi this is Rosie
you’ve been selected for a five-day
luxury cruise to the Bahamas’…
...

In the burning sands of desert,
Was once born an orphan boy.
Poor, lonely, no brother, no sister,
No cradle, cot, dollor toy.
...

1

The children of the Czar
Played with a bouncing ball
...

STRANGER.
Old friend! why you seem bent on parish duty,
Breaking the highway stones,--and 'tis a task
...

God is eternal powerful morning light,
Day is symbol to access trust in him,
We motivate mind to find light's breeze,
Beauty of joy revives in mind's core,
...

Blue and pink sashes,
Criss-cross shoes,
Minna and Stella run out into the garden
To play at hoop.
...

The weathered old barn
On the middle of the farm
Memories linger
Of my grandfather's hardwork
...

A wise grandfather, skilled designer,
approached with serious concern -
to ask 'What is a poem? '...
no ready answer - but the question
...

``Grandmother dear, you do not know; you have lived the old-world life,
Under the twittering eaves of home, sheltered from storm and strife;
...

Falling in pressure of others
You should not adopt abortion,
As I am inside your womb,
Now I am waiting to see Earth.
...

I came to the cemetery in the hazy heat of autumn,
where the crosses creak as they split,
to my grandmother-Maria Iosefovna-
and bought flowers at the gate.
...

Yet like grandfather
I bathe before the village crow

the dry chlorine water
my only Ganges
...

(_An epistle from a narrow-minded old gentleman to a young artist of
superior intellect and intense realism._)
...

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

Count Francesco Cenci.
Giacomo, his Son.
...

Convalescing after a surgery
I was forbidden by the surgeon
from lifting weight, walking long,
driving, even travelling by car.
...

Who, who will be the next man to entrust his girl to a friend?
Love interferes with fidelities;
The gods have brought shame on their relatives;
...

1

Who’ll be honoured and praised,
who’ll be dead, and abused,
...

(New Derry, Westmoreland County, PA)

Grandfather Lawrence, whom I never knew,
I wonder what appeasing light, if any,
...

Time waited for none.
Years rolled on and on.
Child Narendra grew up well,
As a boy strong and tall.
...

When Newton saw an apple fall, he found
In that slight startle from his contemplation--
'Tis said (for I 'll not answer above ground
For any sage's creed or calculation)--
...

Unforgettable is the memory of my Grandpa,
Sitting at the dining table, so calm,
Enjoying his sumptuous breakfast of
Steamed ‘idlis'- rice cakes, with
...