another one!

grandmother stories

we are remembered in her forgotten tales, returned

to her quiet solace in amnesiac words and worlds gently

calling us between comebacks,

drawing us from afternoon naps that cannot

last forever. unwillingly filial at first,

we soon uncover strange prodigality

chained like a jade pendant to curiosity,

a piety frail and spidery as the fingers we grasp

sitting cross-legged by her good ear

struggling behind her dialect and

straining to let no syllable slip

from her slow unhurried beat.

rapt and reverent,

we trace the edges of her past

round the contours of her face

as her dentures scrape the stories from the

corners of her gums –

there they sit, embedded,

golden in the dark,

streets without names that map the paths

of her memory on our history

leaving wrinkles at the intersections.

---

we imagine, we see

the alley she was born in,

the corners she played and prayed,

the markets where she learnt to tell

her pomfret from garoupa, each old and buried place

an almanac of home. in her telling and retellings

we unearth slow-boiled concoctions of

her ancient remedies, otherwise prescribed

to the absence of landmarks

in the abscesses of her time.

occasionally we find potholes,

burnt into her path by tears

that answered prayers for rain, their

hollow monotony carving

ridges in her hands. those were our childhood nurseries

many times removed,

the puddles that once cupped with joy

mother, Uncle Kenny and

Shanghai-emigrated Aunt

as they grew up by her side,

pushed to fly the egret path,

then come home for the winter.

---

at once we sense courage

laced with quiet aged care,

the way her charismatic eyes

swirl grey with cataracts, their emanating hope

still shining in the fluorescence

of our now-adopted remembrance.

we are suddenly characters ourselves,

more transformed than absorbed

as we listen to her parables and find

fragments of familiar trees

woven through their canopy. Somehow subconsciously,

we lean closer and demand for more

as if we were children again

asking for stories.