My grandmother: 1859 - 1944
Cup filling was her main assignment.
At twenty-one she’d agreed to it
with no clear notion of what it meant,
although she knew her mother knew.
It came of being female. That much
she knew about choicelessness,
the path on which she moved
within her Brooklyn brownstone.
Johnny was a good provider
(New-York-City-Irish born),
but Annie Sheedy’s view of fate
lay with other melancholies
in the hard clay of Irish ages,
women risen from lilies and roses,
men from blowsy cabbages,
both from beds of stony silence.
John Francis Sheedy was a teetotaler
who came home for his noonday meal.
Supper was for six. Two boys, two girls.
The older boy thrown out by his father
for drinking. At twenty-one. The younger
dead at fifteen. Rheumatic heart.
The youngest, a girl given to tantrums.
My mother, their second, taught ten years,
married, taught for almost fifty more.
Decades seethed. No one said much.
Grandma stopped standing up to fill cups.
Sitting down by her dining room window
she watched folk coming down Park Slope
from St Augustine’s on the corner.
I asked, “Are you looking for someone?”
She answered, “For Annie Rafferty.”
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