monday poem #210: Andrea Potos, "Yaya's Mandolin"
Yaya's Cloth (Yaya = "grandmother" in Greek) is a terrific collection chronicling immigrant experience, family history and tragedy, the birth and growth of the author's daughter, and the visit to Greece in which all these threads converge. 
kass, I think you might really like this one.
Yaya's Mandolin
Memory strums faintly through my mother.
She was two, and there was constant
music for one month
in the three-room apartment over the diner.
A mandolin on loan for Yaya;
her own left for her brother Paul
when she sailed forever from Greece.
When asthma killed him,
there were no sons left.
Great-grandmother passed on the mandolin
to a village boy.
I did not know what you wanted,
she cried to Yaya.
Yaya shakes her head when she tells me,
and I wonder what happens
to all the words, the music
never released-
if they are locked, like loss,
inside the heart's silent house,
so that a woman must play her mandolin
without stopping-
even while her daughter sleeps-
the mother who knows truly
her joys are not hers to keep,
but are borrowed
and must be returned to the world.
- Andrea Potos
from Yaya's Cloth
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kass, I think you might really like this one.
Yaya's Mandolin
Memory strums faintly through my mother.
She was two, and there was constant
music for one month
in the three-room apartment over the diner.
A mandolin on loan for Yaya;
her own left for her brother Paul
when she sailed forever from Greece.
When asthma killed him,
there were no sons left.
Great-grandmother passed on the mandolin
to a village boy.
I did not know what you wanted,
she cried to Yaya.
Yaya shakes her head when she tells me,
and I wonder what happens
to all the words, the music
never released-
if they are locked, like loss,
inside the heart's silent house,
so that a woman must play her mandolin
without stopping-
even while her daughter sleeps-
the mother who knows truly
her joys are not hers to keep,
but are borrowed
and must be returned to the world.
- Andrea Potos
from Yaya's Cloth
comments on Dreamwidth || Leave a comment at Dreamwidth || How to use OpenID