Grandparents Poems

People live forever in Jacksonville and St. Petersburg and Tampa,
But you don't have to live forever to become a grampa.
The entrance requirements for grampahood are comparatively mild,
You only have to live until your child has a child.
...

For Grace Bulmer Bowers


From narrow provinces
...

Friendship

Friendship is love,
Without friendship love means nothing!
...

The white woman across the aisle from me says 'Look,
look at all the history, that house
on the hill there is over two hundred years old, '
as she points out the window past me
...

I woke up this morning
and I was mourning
weary and broken
my life burnin' down to ashes and smokin'
...

On an island the soft hue of memory,
moss green, kerosene yellow, drifting, mingling
in the Caribbean Sea,
a six-year-old named Alfred
...

More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
...

1992

1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.
...

O Great Spirit,
You who in Your form of the Chapungu,
the great eagle with sharper eye than any aeroplane,
watches over us and knows all things;
...

O TAKE my hand, Walt Whitman!
Such gliding wonders! such sights and sounds!
Such join'd unended links, each hook'd to the next!
...

once the fashionable social nuclear family
was promoted as a perfect modern model
of a solid safe home good family pedigree
...

As The Bible Tells Me So

we are descendants
from our great-great-great-grandparents
...

If the rules were suddenly reversed
And the children were to die first,
Because of the virus still up in the air
Wouldn't more people then worry and care.
...

It's very painful to say
That my grandparents r no more
As I write them today
Words r less to adore
...

why is it whenever we get up to sing

the library disclaimer kicks in at the Open Mic
...

Oh, I wasn't always this old, Whipper Snapper.
There was a time when I was just as young as you.
There was a time I, too, played with baby toys.
A time, I played sports in high school, too.
...

From the moment we became grandparents we have felt conflicted
at the way, in books and media, grandparents are depicted.

But we've been grandparents for a while now
...

Grandparents
Monday,15th April 2019

Who shapes the destiny of the children?
...