Sometimes a Poem Is Good

[thisnewday]

The first place winner in the adult group of the Central New York branch of American Pen Women's poetry contest was published in the Sunday Stars magazine. It was titled, "The Last Straw" and was authored by local writer Robin B. Butler.

It recounts a horrific day during which every conceivable misfortune rains down upon the narrator until the proverbial "last straw" described in the following exerpt:

   Car wheels screech to a stop near our back
   door: the other grandmother.

   She's arrived too early to fetch our grandson,
   who's still riding the yellow bus home.

   We have him now for toothaches, nightmares
   and trips to K-mart for new underwear.

   She gets Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny
   and blow out your candles birthday boy.

   I long to tell her Not today, I've already lost
   too much but do chickens count?

   Rascal races by with my Rhode Island Red
   clenched in his teeth and I know they do.

   Mama's cast iron skillet never lifted with such
   ease.

Sometimes a poem is good because it hits you like a blow to the solar plexis. In this one, it's the lines, "We have him now for toothaches, nightmares/ and trips to K-mart for new underwear," that does it to me. Even now, I can't read them without tearing up, so powerfully do they remind me of what we've experienced in the brief, half dozen years of our grandson's life.

Still, that experience has brought home, in some equally powerful ways, that the small traumas and mundane necessities of a child's life are the very ones in which the steadfast caring of the "lesser grandparent" is needed the most. Because it isn't about us, it's about the child who has endured so much disappointment and loss in so short a time.

I get the poem, I really do. And I congratulate Ms. Butler on its publication and the well-deserved recognition it's garnered for her. But, as a grandparent, I've found my reward in the affection of my grandson - which I wouldn't trade for a Pulitzer...