Our Grandmothers Know Grief

i.

On the day it happened, I wondered if she remembered my name.

If there’s much leaving left to do when your mind is
a sieve with kin-shaped holes.

A decaying library. A reservoir on fire.

As a girl I’d sit in her lap and peel garlic for hours, scent-stained fingers
reminiscent of home. An imprint of laughter outlasting generations. 

Now I bleed language everywhere I go, romanticising blotches into
maps, crying in diaspora poems and pretending to
understand unbelonging.

Meanwhile she was history erasing itself, parade balloon grenades
rising into the sky, recolonising war and reuniting nations.

A lone survivor dancing with corpses and redrawing borders. 

Was it a portal into a softer past? Or just more echoes to lament?

The way time kills even the dead. The way ghosts are only
ghosts so long as someone remembers them. The way you can lose
the loss of a homeland, too.

I realised too late. I realised too late.

Now I mourn her and I mourn her grief, a museum no one managed
to preserve.

Now I’m searching for the meaning of myself when she
was right there.

She was right there.

Did she feel it happening, a spreading cancer of emptying rooms?

Did she know that she had loved?

ii.

On the day it happened, I hope she invented sunlight.

A decaying fire. A reservoir reminiscent of laughter.

Generations rising into the sky, reuniting and dancing into a
softer homeland.

The way someone remembers. A museum for the
meaning of rooms loved.

I was right there. I was right there.