At eleven, my granddaughter looks like my daughter
did, that slender body, that thin face, the grace
with which she moves. When she visits, she sits
with my daughter; they have hot chocolate together
and talk. The way my granddaughter moves her hands,
the concentration with which she does everything,
knocks me back to the time when I sat with my daughter
at this table and we talked and I watched the grace
with which she moved her hands, the delicate way
she lifted the heavy hair back behind her ear.
My daughter is grown now, married
in a fairy-tale wedding, divorced, something inside
her broken, healing slowly. I look at my granddaughter
and I want to save her, as I was not able
to save my daughter. Nothing is that simple,
all our plans, carefully made, thrown into a cracked
pile by the way love betrays us.
by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
from What We Pass On: Collected Poems: 1980-2009
This poem was read as part of The Writer's Almanac 1/9/15 listen at http://writersalmanac.org/episodes/20150109/
Maria's Official Site is at MariaGillan.com. Her latest publication is the poetry and art collection, The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets
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