In Memory of My Grandmother, Annette Spector

The night I arrived in Cleveland, Ohio for my grandmother’s funeral,

I saw her ghost in the form of an old woman walking up the driveway

That runs past the hotel where I am staying.

From a distance, she seemed her old cheerful self,

But still, this visitation from the other world frightened me.

The sound of her warm, high-pitched laughter

Ran through me like a shudder.

What does she want from me? I wondered.

Then it occurred to me, I had written her husband—

My grandfather—a poem when he passed nearly a year ago.

Was my grandmother jealous that she herself didn’t have a poem
Written in her memory? That must have been it.

I can feel her now, peering over my shoulder,

Smiling as the words flow out of my pen—

That warm, beaming smile that seemed to grow more effervescent

The older she became. I can hear her little chortles,

Like petals falling from a pink hydrangea,

After each line, remembering who she was in this life,
And seeing the man I have become.