Centurion

Last year, on grandma's on hundredth birthday, I was near the end of my 100 poems project (I gave myself a goal of writing 100 poems in 100 days). The entry I wrote here yesterday reminded me of the poem I wrote on June 24, 2008:


I think
when I die,
it will just be like flowers
   or flies, you know?
     ~Just be there and then I won't
and it'll be
fine,
you know?

And
just as much in
the living as
in the dying,
you touch some deeper
part of a current
beyond conceiving,
without any pretense
of wisdom
that is
in itself
wiser
than flowers
or flies.

Who can tell this story?
First of ten families in the Dakotas,
Oldest of eight children
of Finnish immigrants,
mother of two
grandmother of eight
greatgrandmother of four...

The fact that you
hitchhiked as a teenager
across the country
(sacks of rattlesnakes on the floorboards)
at a time when cars were
newer than the internet
(and certainly a more
tectonic shift)...

The balls you had,
to sleep under the sky
in city parks
with Hoover youth
sharing what they had
over an oil barrel fire...

Or crossing over the wilds of mountain
passes in a model-T with no windows
along roads so steep and slow
you might as well have walked
to that foreign city on the Sound,
Seattle...

That you talked your way
into a real job,
at Swedish--
new in town--
depression Seattle...

Married a union organizer
decades older
and then after, left him
in Chehalis,
taking your two boys
to find a better life
at Yesler Terrace--
he was sick
you said, tapping your chest,
sick in the heart,
immobilized and hopeless,
but not you,
never you...

That you and those boys
bought a house
on paper route pay
and cleaning for cash and a handshake,
blacklisted
by McCarthy's bastards
for the transgression
of having been once
married to a Red...

And all the years
of working, learning,
organizing,
and keeping on,
so quietly
that one almost might not know
what kind of miracle
you have wrought.

And that tonight,
all of us,
under that same roof--
the two brothers,
the eight grandchildren and four partners
and most of the great grands
shouting with laughter in the darkening
terraces of garden--a quarter acre
in the heart of the city
you have carved out
and kept carved decade after decade,
in the neighborhood
where respectable people didn't buy then
(and now can't afford)--
all of us drink your health.

Here's to the next one hundred years!