The picture of elegance, my grandfather.
I wanted his photograph in the dictionary.
Alone of the men I knew as a kid,
he always wore a shirt with a collar,
always shined his shoes. Equanimity
in a family on the run from itself.
He amazed me once with a cardboard box
of baby chicks, each in a small square as if
he’d waved a wand over a carton of eggs.
A fuzz of feathers, beaks and fragile lives.
No more afraid than all of us, he said.
Just sit with them, tell them apart, listen.
Only if you see someone, can you become
someone. Long gone, he still is and they are.
Copyright © 2025 by Tom Healy. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 14, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“There is a rough beauty to rural life. But elegance? I grew up very poor on a small dairy farm, on a dirt road far away from almost everywhere. The only clue I had to what elegance might be was my mother’s father. He rarely came to visit us, but he always arrived in a gleaming Oldsmobile, wearing a suit and tie and beautiful shoes that were quickly covered in the mud of our lives. My grandfather was a mystery to me. And I learned from him to try to love the mystery in all living things.”
—Tom Healy
Tom Healy is the author of three collections of poetry: Velvet (Monk Books 2019); Animal Spirits (Monk Books 2015); and What the Right Hand Knows (Four Way Books, 2009), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award.
Healy served as chairman of the Fulbright Scholarship Board, which oversees the worldwide Fulbright scholars program, from 2011 to 2014. He has taught at New York University, Pratt Institute, and The New School, and serves on the boards of PEN America and the O, Miami Poetry Festival.