Her Story In Verse

I began this blog with a fond memory of my Nana who died ten years ago this summer, a person I loved writing for and reading with. In an odd parallel, a few weeks ago we found out my grandma Julie died. While it should be a sad time for me or our family, it is just strange and means the end of something that was the mystery of a lifetime: My dad's lifetime, to be exact. It was his mother, her mysteriousness and a family I learned more about when I went to Ireland in 1998 at the age of twenty than I ever had in all my years living before or after. Meeting two of her remaining family members in Longford that year in the actual stone home in which she was born was something I'll remember always. But what came out of the conversations was not pretty, much like life.

In the order of honoring her memory, or how I have come to terms with being most honest about her memory, here is a poem I started a few years ago but could not finish until her death. It is worth noting that the meaningfulness she brought to my life is extremely underrated. While she was never around, we did exchange letters in 2001-2002 and the energy I spent tracking down facts and official documents, asking questions and trying to piece together some kind of reasonable explanation why...made me feel strangely close to her in many ways and she and my dad are the only two left with her green eyes. That said, we will never know the true story or stories and for many reasons, I'm so glad they lived in an era before cell phone cameras and Google searches. While it's not pretty, there's comfort in being able to take the facts and use my own imagination:


A Photograph Never Taken

There she stood
in an A-line peasant skirt,
age eleven,
with nondescript, indeterminate
immigrant blood
thrashing through tiny veins.

Julia, called Junie, became Julie,
and in the final document Smyth
read Smith, and the last stamp
said, nothing will be the same.

Even her birthdate was misplaced—
no, purposefully wrong.
She was not the intended traveller,
the one to leave, dock, set foot.

She made three sandwiches
of soda and cheese
wrapped in paper for a sister
two years older.

But in Longford, the pit of Irish turf,
fog deceived and disease consumed
children, mothers, husbands and yes,
even the youth starving to leave.
She was next in line.

In the middle of tragedy,
before the third member
of the family was buried,
Junie, my wee grandmother
boarded the boat and was gone.

In my daydreams of her moment
first there on Ellis Island,
I think she had the feeling
in my body the early morning
my plane, headed for Dublin,
touched down.

The rush of adventure, effervescent
thrill of a new land and independence,
she was on her own
and surely the sun shone that day
when she stepped out and thought
what next?

Then her aunts shouted out
the wrong name, but saw the same face
they expected to appear,
for she was one of them.
In a building of rats, condemned
to living their way of life.

It wasn’t Ireland,
but the whisky smelled the same,
and prohibition meant profit—
the bigger the bathtub,
the more to green to gain.
An entire social network
dancing to the pulse of their
gin-tub main.

When they met she was older
but hardly taller,
a slight beauty they say
in mildly porcelain skin.

She was straight from the land
Of small sprites and birds in hand
And faery tales that dance in the wind.

Enchanted, he was,
with this woman-sparrow
and she loved the uniformed
forearm of the sea-fearing officer.

A medal and two salty years later
they married in 1933,
the beginning of
a severed family tree.


He had a sort-of German last name,
an Anglo-American work-ethic
from middle-America, little pretentia,
and a heart that bled purple for the
god-blessed US of A.

He smoked a pipe and cigarettes
intensely as if they were breaths,
walked long steps, loved war maps,
and called all Asians Japs.

From conception my father
and his two brothers
didn’t know how very old
their parents ages ranged.
They couldn’t foresee
how clipped and unsung
a relationship speaking
in separate tongues
could actually be.

At night she went away
to the pubs to dance and whirl
drink and sing until night became day
and lived like a firefly in seasonal magic.

What happened is tragic:
the family fractured like messy glass
irreparably damaged, increasable pants.
Roused mid night, the boys piled in
And they drove all night, all day, all night
Through a warm, too quiet, California.

Tossing and turning the four rode,
hills too woven, through backroads
into the intimate hinterlands of our state—
Oregon-- awaiting prosecution.

My father’s father was a fugitive
from the Irishwoman, his own wife.
And she never went after them,
never searched for her sons, her life.

This is the fiction based on fact
The truth is Grandma Julie died
May seventh two thousand and nine
At the age of ninety four.
I wish I could say more.
She made my dad and I love her for that.