My Grandmother Is A Rosebush

My grandmother is a rosebush

Her auburn hair in dusky peach bloom

I play her Gershwin, Waller, Armstrong, Ella and Shaw

She listens

By some transubstantiate trickery she keeps it playing long after I’m gone,

Long after the battery should have died and yet she keeps it playing

Keeps it playing

I can almost feel her luxuriate

Stretching out her roots into new soil, catch the beat, and then

Sway-sway

Feel the breeze in this new way, not on skin but on petal and leaf and thorn and then

Sway sway

I can almost feel her play-

Playing with me

Saying ‘you see!’

You see I was right with my spells and my friends out on the green

You should be scared of me

Everyone always was…

a little scared of me

It’s true nana I say, I always was..

A little scared

The way you held yourself erect

Exuding a sense of ‘do not mess’

I ask her to tell me how I might best be

A little more like her

I listen

But I haven't yet learnt how to hear

Maybe if I keep showing up and asking

She will find a way to tell me

And I will find a way to hear

Nana, rosebush

Grandmother rose

Just outside my window as I write this,

looking a little forlorn in the rain

The strange alchemical permutation of life into decay

into new life

all of the life in the death,

and all of the love in the mulch

Of the life

now gone

that had its day

and how new life will always have its way with the old.

And at the end of the day I can only ask

Whether you have really gone away

The answer to which it is both yes and no

and somehow also

a shrug, a little glimmer in the eye, a smirk

I don’t know

Is it you in there

Is it you there

Are you there Nana?

Rosebush, Grandmother rose

Vegetal time is slow like ancestral time

It unfurls

If I stretch out my hand today might you take it

some years from now

A paper doll chain of mothers holding hands back and back

unfold, splay, then concertina back into the overlay

Can you hear the grandmothers’ hips?

Sway sway

So I will sit with you nana and play

Gershwin, Waller, Armstrong, Ella and Shaw

And be a little scared

And a little unsure

Of how much can be carried across

What passes along and what cannot

But I am here

listening

and trying to walk the very narrow bridge

That sway-sways

This way and that

between

I think you might meet me

half way one day

You always were something of a Circe

My nana, my rosebush

My Grandmother rose