MY GRANDMOTHER BROUGHT ME TO HER CHILDHOOD WOODS
- Mar 14
- 2 min read
By Phoebe Owen
We walked the bracken paths, stumbling
through rotten bark and crimson leaves.
She breathed the earth, her 80 years
ad blissful infinitum. I swept away
the gnats and brambles clawing at my swaddled limbs.
She asked me, through her cradle walls,
held firmly by the world’s wide arms
which forest path I’d wandered most
to scratch for blackberries, track for badgers,
spar the oak trunk knights of castles past; I said:
“My bushes bore white plastic fruit, and
the dwellers manned their towers on my command.”
I led her then through ageless ruins,
where the slabs below housed no colonies, no mossy well-to-do,
wriggling flat through flickering foxholes
of unwritten memory.
At last, by Kaiadas’ walls outreached
we watched as waystones shuddered in a pace-less dance,
whose existence had no pull to age or change or hasten;
just tick.
In a windless round, the stones began to wail.
“Our state is no more living than at rest,
our tomb hosts all that need what lies behest.
Always where we were, where we are, and where we will be hence,
as we guard our static womb and transparencies condense.”
We paused, they thought on.
My grandmother’s memory hanged aloft, rocked
in a hammock of grizzling vines and wireworms,
waving gently at the still wind.
I stood among the waystones, ankylosed as Ozymandias,
waiting for the spring to ask the bells to stay for summer.
They rested in tarred plastic soil, while I shuddered to remember.
We walked the bracken paths, stumbling
through rotten bark and crimson leaves.
She breathed the earth, her 80 years
ad blissful infinitum. I swept away
the gnats and brambles clawing at my swaddled limbs.
She asked me, through her cradle walls,
held firmly by the world’s wide arms
which forest path I’d wandered most
to scratch for blackberries, track for badgers,
spar the oak trunk knights of castles past; I said:
“My bushes bore white plastic fruit, and
the dwellers manned their towers on my command.”
I led her then through ageless ruins,
where the slabs below housed no colonies, no mossy well-to-do,
wriggling flat through flickering foxholes
of unwritten memory.
At last, by Kaiadas’ walls outreached
we watched as waystones shuddered in a pace-less dance,
whose existence had no pull to age or change or hasten;
just tick.
In a windless round, the stones began to wail.
“Our state is no more living than at rest,
our tomb hosts all that need what lies behest.
Always where we were, where we are, and where we will be hence,
as we guard our static womb and transparencies condense.”
We paused, they thought on.
My grandmother’s memory hanged aloft, rocked
in a hammock of grizzling vines and wireworms,
waving gently at the still wind.
I stood among the waystones, ankylosed as Ozymandias,
waiting for the spring to ask the bells to stay for summer.
They rested in tarred plastic soil, while I shuddered to remember.