GIFTS FROM MY GRANDSON HAVING TO DO WITH HOPE ON MLK DAY

 

GIFTS FROM MY GRANDSON

HAVING TO DO WITH HOPE

Coming down the mountain

in the Mothership, I’m hearing

your question from the ride up,

Do we have enough gas, Grandpa?

You’ve been looking at the gauge.

Eight miles out of Naches

nursing the gas peddle

I know better. Who wants

to pick up a hitchhiker

with Covid racing.

Use your mind to beat the distance,

I say, waiting for Grandma

to come with some diesel.

Thirty minutes later you appear

with a knotty stick from a beaver dam.

You know where it fits in the garden.

Grandpa, this is a reminder, you say.

I don’t tell you then what my friend

said about the writer we loved

who died last week. How he’d go

to the beaver dam when he felt hopeless

about his work. Then go back to work.

Thanks, Josh,

but the story I want

to tell you comes from this morning.

You’re going through old cards,

find the one of Martin Luther King, Jr.

On the back, the boy in the baseball cap

reading his new zip code: we’re 98903.

MLK’s dream awakens a nation.

Flashback ‘63 in green, on front.

The day after King’s Remembrance Day.

Sending Grandma and me this card.

The hope it gives me. That stick

from the beaver dam? That stick.

Knotty. Tough. True, like Josh.

Gpa

19 January 2021