Nora’s story – poet John F. Deane remembers his grandmother who died 60 years ago
Alamy / Ninette Maumus
She was born late in the nineteenth century and was, for me in the middle of the twentieth century, a love, a saint and an enigma. Granny. Now, though she has been dead for 60 years, though I am a Granddad myself, she is forever with me. I will not see her, because she is and is not there: for her, all mystery has long dissolved to an ecstasy of being. Should I sense her brush my cheek with the warmth of her passing, I know I fool myself; and if I hear her sing, like a seal crooning on seaweed-slithery rocks, I will not interpret this as a message in another tongue. I simply breathe a word to her, in love and thankfulness.
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