Remembering those you love

These two poems memorialise two much loved family members, my grandmother - nonna - who lived an amazing and long life.

Leaving Italy to arrive in Australia in the 1920s, she was one of 13 children. Surviving the privations of WWI and then separation from family she and her husband created a world of friends, family, and success in a new country. She was brave, kind, community-focused and incredibly hardworking and astute well into her 90s.

The second poem is for my father. He was funny, charismatic, honest, and held strong ethical values. He held us to high expectations but had a deep and abiding love for all of his children. He died of cancer when I was 23. He was just 56. To this day I still wonder what he would think about politics, world events, and the course of our lives. What I do know is that we were never the same without him.

Nonna

It is your hands I remember.

Gnarled and hardened,

larger than life.

Nimble, nothing retiring about them.

Wet and glistening in the sink,

sometimes burned from hot pots.

Practised in wood oven cooking, they

served heaven on a plate.

Thick-nailed they turned the soil

and brought forth summer strawberries,

pink-yellow peaches - in winter, rich polenta

and shortbread biscuits.

They dressed me roughly.

They took my tiny hand in theirs and led me.

In conversation, they waved like a song sung in parts.

But I knew you were going when they lay still.

Shiny skin stretched tight over work-worn bones -

they finally rested.

*******

The Magician

In one fading photo, you were wearing a tuxedo.

Sporting an elegant mustache

with your eyes smiling, your sparkling stage teeth,

I should have seen you were a magician.

Now I wonder at the illusion.

What strange alchemy did you devise

that melded such eclectic metals

as us into family gold?

Before your last trick,

we were suspended in your

Svengali eyes.

Together,

look no wires.

One happy rabbit family.

So when you vanished in that final death-affirming act,

I should have known it would be us

that would disappear in a

puff of smoke.