Two-Faced Memory

1.   
She was no taller than the children, 
who would eventually be able to look down  
upon the oiled braids tied with black cloth, 
and greased strings threading her earlobes. 
If she’d worn jewelry, it would have been to a church. 
Still, we couldn’t imagine her in those churches, except 
to see her brother off, laid in land the Methodists owned.   
Or for her wedding—but that had been a small gathering 
at the wooden shack whose dark rooms promised adventure. 
In one corner, the iron bed surfaced in daylight, pulling  
all the worn contents of the room toward it, then sank again  
in evening, like our astral bodies dragged by an undertow.   
Grandmama, little pirate, burying the children  
under quilts and old coats, weighting our slumber with 
leftover clothes of the stubborn dead, seeding our dreams with  
haints hiding under the house, pacing the yard, perching in trees.

2.    
The green truck poised over roiling traffic  
beneath the bridge’s guardrail,  
father dead drunk, wedged behind the wheel. 
Whispers as we feigned sleep—hurt deciphered from garbled cries. 
Grandmama and mama’s prayers that brought him back  
despite ours.

Credit

Copyright © 2026 by Sharan Strange. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 16, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets. 

About this Poem

“[This poem] is inspired by the inscrutable power of my paternal grandmother—an unfathomable and somewhat unnerving figure to me as a child. She lived deep in the country, where her intimate knowledge of living off the land and contending with the arbitrary violences of nature and people gave her the aura of a shaman. Although not a haibun, the poem’s structure is influenced by the haibun’s two parts: The first section creates a sense of a persona within her domestic space; and the brief second section uses symbolism that conveys the precarity and vulnerability of my siblings and I as we reckoned with forces and situations beyond our control. The power accorded our grandmother was based in the mystical imaginings of children enduring painful or unacceptable realities. Every memory of her carries something of the unknown and the ineffable.” 
—Sharan Strange