When I was hardly out of childhood, I wrote this poem to my Grandfather.
To My Grandfather
Grandad, I sit at the foot of the clock
And I think of you as I contemplate
My own curfew, the day I come in
From this brutal but beautiful earth
I suppose you are gone
That you no longer haunt
The corners of Grandmother’s house
A few months after you were gone
Grandma said she felt a strange isolation
She said, a stranger peace.
Grandad, I remember you
Like a fine antique
Carved by the sensual hands
Of a seasoned artisan
Absolutely statuesque
Solid as mahogany
And wholly without speech.
There was never any room
In your parlour of days
For laughter or simple conversation
My brother with his tinkling voice
Clambered up upon your knees
We watched you freeze
Perhaps you impressed us
More than you thought
Your mystery stalks us,
One by one, the buttons from your uniform
Are disappearing from the trunk
Grandma knows they’re gone
Who were you
Who fought in the war
Went west with your wife
And then stole away a thousand times
When the fever descended,
Sealed you from her comprehension
What did you do on those long nights
In the woods without a gun?
You put your country before your life
And when the war was over it gave you
Warden’s clothes and a woody retreat
Grandad, why did you come in before you were due?
Was it that the government
Took away the cabin it had given you
And put you on a pittance wage
To do your bit to speed decay
With lassitude and indisposition?
Nobody ever talks about you.
I don’t know why.
I remember you. I remember
Your thin and gentle hands
And the way they moved when your lips did not.
There is something kinder in that memory
Some mercy in those hallowed woods
Where hags contrive
Our fragile fortunes, while they unfold
To touch us, sear us,
Waver, and die.
My grandfather was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1889, the eighth of thirteen children. When he was little, he was given to his childless uncle and aunt to raise, and those were happy years. Then, when he was eleven or twelve, his father took him back, and moved the family to Canada. They had a farm in Selkirk, Manitoba, and the boy went to Winnipeg to sell newspapers on the street as a way of raising money for his family.
In 1915-16, he enlisted in the army. The men didn’t spend much time training, and were quickly shipped to Europe. In 1916, he was fighting in the trenches. My Dad told me that the men in the trenches fought one another at such close range that their superiors worried about friendships forming.
In 1917, he was buried by a shell at Vimy Ridge and was taken for dead. As the bodies were piled up, he moved a limb, and someone realized that he was alive. He was taken to hospital in France, then to England, and, finally, to Winnipeg. He was discharged in 1919, after being in hospital for nearly two years. He had internal injuries which hadn’t gone diagnosed, and he suffered chronic pain and “shell shock” for the rest of his life.
He didn’t want to talk about his war experiences. I remember him the way I remember him in my poem: silent as stone.
I have inherited that silence. I feel it, even now, as I write about him.
In his essay, “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin talks about the silence of the men who came back from the horrors of the Great War. Their stories were untellable, and with their silence, came a profound loss. “It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.” While published poems and stories came out of the war, the intimate stories, the ones that pass from fathers and mothers to children, were left untold.
Most of the walking wounded buried their experience, and kept their psychological injuries to themselves in a culture that saw (and, to some extent, still sees) chronic pain and depression as signs of weakness in character.
When he came out of hospital, my grandfather went out west where he worked as a park warden. He spent fifty years working to protect the most beautiful country in the world.
My grandfather gave me a book when I was seven years old. It had been handmade and typed, and was filled with fairy tale poems: poems about princesses, kings and queens, and, yes, even unicorns. I hadn’t really been interested in fairy tales until I read those poems. They highlighted moments here and there, and called me to the meaningful depths of ordinary life. I don’t know what became of the book. I recently called the library in Golden, B.C. to see if they knew of it, and they tried to track it down, but they lost the trail.
I haven’t. And when I consider what to offer the spirit of my grandfather from the realm of wonder and all-things-running-beneath, a picture from a Grimm’s fairy tale comes to mind. It comes from a story called “The Boots of Buffalo-Leather.”
A king, dressed as an ordinary man, had gone out into the country, and he was sitting on an old tree stump when a soldier approached. The fellow had nothing to but an old coat to keep the rain off his back.
He shook the king’s hand and stretched himself out on the grass by his side as if they were comrades, of the same class.
“I see you’ve got good boots, well blacked,” he said. “But if you had to travel as much as I have, they wouldn’t keep their shine. Look at mine, they’re made of buffalo-leather. I’ve worn them for a long time, and they’ve taken me through thick and thin.”
The king was impressed. This charming, fearless fellow clearly knew what he was talking about.
After a while, the soldier got hungry and said, “I can stay no longer, Brother Brightboots. Where does this road lead?”
The king didn’t know, but when the soldier stood up, he stood up with him, thinking to himself, “Here is a man to follow.”
The picture of the statue comes from the Vimy Ridge memorial in France. A cloaked young woman stands on top of the front wall overlooking the Douai Plains where the battle was fought. The saddened figure is known as “Canada Bereft,” or “Mother Canada.” She faces eastward, looking out to the dawn of the new day
Michelle,
I love you sentence about fairy tales “the roam of wonder and all-things-beneath”.
Thank you for showing the human story of the inhumanity of a war that was experienced by young men who could not find relief in stories. Men who could not speak of the unspeakable. On the other side of that horrific war was my grandfather. He was the coachman for an ambulance. He had a sense for horses. He must have seen hell on earth. Once they – he and his surgeon whom he ferried with his horses from one place of agony to the next – were hit by explosives. My grandfather’s injured hand was put together again as much as possible by the skill and care of the surgeon
I remember him well, my grandfather, especially his immense mustache and his smiling eyes: “Why did you have such a smiling eyes after having seen such horrors?” I think he loved children, he was always around children. And there were many on the streets of his village. He died when I was four years old. I still remember how everyone was crying as his body was carried into the house by other men. They had been trying to clear the rubble of the house down the street that had been destroyed by bombs the night before. It was the time of another war. A wall tumbled down and took his life. He will always be my hero with the smiling eyes. I will always wonder what was the strength that sustained him.
Thank you for your stories, Michelle.
Erika
Thank you for sharing your story, Erika. I am profoundly moved by it, by your grandfather with the smiling eyes. May the stories of humanity keep seeping through, may their stories be our remembrance.
Dear Michelle,
Thank you for this beautiful poem and memoir about your grandfather…and thank you, too, Erika, for your story.
I was so moved by this quote: “It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.” It is part of our human experience to tell stories, and thus transform the pain of life rather than have it freeze or moulder inside us. My father, a doctor, was on a hospital transport ship in the Pacific in World War II, which took wounded men out of battle (the ship was one of the few hospital ships equipped with guns). I recently saw a youtube film made by one of the sailors on board – and it showed me things my father never talked about, ever. though he lived until 1993; it gave me shivers — not just seeing the wounded, but seeing the ordinary life on the ship, the islands they stopped at, etc., and made me feel closer to my father. I wrote a poem about him, “My Father Before the War,” based on a photograph of him in uniform before he left; as I was conceived soon before he left and born in March 1945 while he was overseas, I missed the person he was before going to war. I ended the poem with these words: “That father I never knew.” So many of us have experienced this with fathers and grandfathers.
Let us hope and pray for peace, today of all days.
Very moving post, Michelle. I too was struck by the line “It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.” Something special to add to this post – E. H. Shepard, the illustrator who did Winnie the Pooh, had done a number of illustrations during his tenure in the war, and they’ve recently been found, tucked away in a trunk along with his uniform and artist tools.
An interesting read, and the pictures are, some of them, just gorgeous. The article is here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/11966866/First-World-War-sketches-by-Winnie-the-Pooh-illustrator-discovered-in-trunk.html and the images can be seen here – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/11966866/First-World-War-sketches-by-Winnie-the-Pooh-illustrator-discovered-in-trunk.html
Sorry, the second link should go to – https://www.google.com/search?q=shepard+trench+drawings+found&espv=2&biw=883&bih=571&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CCYQsARqFQoTCOfx6rvoiMkCFYZUPgodAXYEOA&dpr=1.25
What a beautiful tribute to your grandfather, Michelle. It moved me to tears. Your appreciation of him is so loving. Thank you.
Isn’t that amazing, Ellen, to happen upon something about your father that he himself never spoke of. And isn’t it true that it’s not just the dramatic things, but the ordinary events of life that wish to be known. Has your poem bee published? I don’t remember reading it. Would love to!
This is a real treasure, Jen. Thank you so much for sharing the links. E.H. Shepard had a lot of war experience: definitely a man whose boots had taken him through thick and thin. Not to mention his art. Wow.
The Sheppard drawings and article are fascinating — thanks, Jen!
YOU are the treasure in a magnificent chest of “Michelle’s marvellous magical mysteries” …I found your poem so moving and insightful for such a young age…your Grandad was very special to you..and now even though we seem to live in a bubble here in Canada..the wars across the seas continue to rage with this most recent horror in Paris..and in Beirut ..and in Syria..may the understanding of those stories shed insights for peace ..or am I being too naive?
I sincerely hope not, Helene! And thank you so much for your comments.
Hi Michelle and all,
Yes, my poem was published in my poetry collection “Skinny-Dipping with the Muse” (Guernica 2014), and in an earlier anthology, “Letters & Pictures from the Old Suitcase,” which I edited with my friend Lil Blume, to accompany our Canadian Jewish Writing Festival in Hamilton (Pinking Shears Publications, 2012). I think you have the “Skinny-Dipping”. book, right? In the anthology, I was able to include the photograph on which the poem is based. If you don’t have the poem, I can email a copy — or put it up on the blog, or elsewhere on the website, if you like.
I just re-read your poem about your grandfather — it is so moving, and the images are haunting. Especially now, after Beirut and Paris.
We’ll have our lunch eventually — sooner rather than later, I hope.
Love & Light, Ellen
Oh, yes, Ellen, I should have remembered that line you wrote: “why did a man who gets seasick go into the navy? He never said.” Your Letters and Pictures collection is very special, and I began my journal last month with one of your poems from Skinny Dipping …”Next morning/my heart is full/ with the music of wanting/those gaps between worlds,/ how easily/we fall inside.
I’d had a beautiful dream in one of those gaps.
So glad you’re publishing!
Thank you, Michelle, for these comments — and for reminding me of that poem and those lines. They had fallen off my radar, though it’s a poem close to my heart, and it’s nice to hear them again and know they spoke to you.
Ellen
What a conversation you’ve started, Michelle! As the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “The world is made of stories, not atoms,” and each and every one of the stories people so generously shared is poignant and powerful. Thanks to all!