8 days old

Today’s WP Daily Post invites us to create and share a poem for someone we love.

Being a new grandmother, I jumped on the opportunity to combine three loves: for my son – and now his son – as well as for using poetry in service to expression.

The following two poems are in the form of a ‘Minute’ because they each contain 60 syllables. I first encountered this form in a poem by 2010 Poet Laureate of North Carolina, Cathy Smith Bowers (“How I Became an Existentialist”): three stanzas of 20 syllables, each stanza 8-4-4-4. [I have not rhymed my couplets, although that is part of the ‘official’ form.] Cathy discovered this form to contain and express her acute grief in the aftermath of her younger brother’s’ death. She says “I believe that every moment of intensity is a moment inside some narrative.”

What better moment-in-a-narrative than these two minutes of love:

HOW I BECAME NANNY-GRAM
They knew he’d be a baby boy
and would be born
early this month,
my own birth time.

They asked what I’d like to be called
and quite simply
it came to me:
I’m Nanny Gram!

A compound name that lets me be
grandmother and
poet, sending
my love to him.

***

“NOT A MINUTE BIG”
So my mother was wont to say
of small houses;
and now I see
another place

for such a phrase: tiny newborn,
little peanut,
my son’s new son,
beautiful boy!

Not a minute goes by these days
without my thoughts
of him growing
bigger, and up.

swb