I think this might have been the first poem I ever posted on the blog. I didn’t have a lot of followers then, and I don’t know that it’s gotten a lot of attention. I’m happy to have an opportunity to share it again, thanks to Annie at Tales of a Family, who posted a writing prompt for this week “inviting us to remember the men who shaped our lives – not always through grand speeches or big moments, but through the quiet lessons they lived every day.”

I’ve talked about my grandfather, James, in the collaboration Annie and I have been working on, about how his death prompted me to start my creative journey. But his life inspired me, too. He worked hard, he fought in World War II and lost friends doing it, he loved and supported his family (his wife, my beautiful grandmother and his six children), and he enjoyed the small, quiet moments you can carve out in a busy, not always easy life. He loved fishing, sitting on the porch swing, making music. He taught me to love those moments, too.

So here’s a poem for him, a memory and an elegy, that I’m grateful to revisit, called “My Grandfather’s Guitar.”

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My grandfather’s guitar sits in a corner of my study
untouched, gathering dust.
When I was young and he was already old, it could pull notes straight from the air
through his fingers and into my ears.
I can hear them, though he is gone and his instrument’s gone quiet.
When I was young, not even ten,
he’d pick it up and start to play and then I’d go still,
stuck to one spot until he was done.
My grandfather’s guitar in his hands made magic, but I was too young to understand
that music is magic made real for a moment.
A fret and a twang and he’d made something that didn’t exist before
and wouldn’t again.
I sometimes imagine myself back there, wearing muddy tennis shoes with tangled hair,
just listening.
I can hear it, but no song ever sounds the same twice.