Legacy of the printed word

My grandmother died six years ago. She was 84. It was one of those days that leave you with wonder. She died the same day that we learned my wife was pregnant with our first son. The sorrow of death mixed with the joy of new life.

I often think about my grandmother, and wish she were still around. She was a source of quiet inspiration. It wasn’t so much what she said that counted, for she would never have been the loudest in a group, but rather how she led her life. She was a writer—mostly of poetry and short stories.

My mother gave me a small suitcase yesterday. It was decades old and sturdy. Inside were poems and stories written by my grandmother. Most of the pages were typewritten (she grew up in a period before home computers), and many had been yellowed by time. I pawed through the pages and couldn’t help but marvel at the legacy that my grandmother had left. Her life. Her memories. Her most cherished thoughts were contained in this one little suitcase. As I read her work it was as if she had come alive.

I imagined her sitting in her kitchen or garden and being inspired by the simple things that life gives us. She lived most of her life in the Cowichan Valley, on Vancouver Island, and wrote about her community, her garden, the seasons, and her loving relationship with my grandfather, I suspect. She wrote about a once magnificent, turned run down hotel in Brandon, Manitoba. And about leaving Cuba, a place my grandparents visited often, long before it became the tourist mecca it is today. And she wrote simply about the flowers in her garden.

Her musings spanned the last half of the 20th Century, some of which were published in newspapers and magazines. In 1995, she published a book of poems called, Through Cedar Portals.

Little would she have known that years after death, her grandson would find such delight in this treasure trove of memories. I hope you do as well. Here are a handful of her poems.

Cold
is a forgotten fridge spilling ice-cubes
in the lemonade light
Cold is the prick of frosted stars
in a popsicle night
Cold is a glass lid on the pond
a white-sugared morning in December
Cold is what the sticky
cotton-candy mind of summer
tries to remember

B.R. Donohue, 1970


The Writer of Hate Literature
Long ago he fed a ribbon of venom
into his typewriter, and each word
he clacks spells HATE!
Twisted mouths seize his wild-eyed words
writhe them into different shapes
and spit them under the roof
of fanaticism, where they quiver
in electric air and re-form to spell
HATE!
And in the end
when his slimy ribbon-trail has led
beneath the last grey stone
will the chiseled words
REST IN PEACE?

B.R. Donohue, 1965


Friends
Over the years
the climate of our friendship
has changed;
now I can almost
warm my hands
on the letters
of your name

B.R. Donohue 1981


Anniversary
Sometimes it seems
you know my thoughts
and often
I too hear unspoken words
in the comfortable silences;
this lovely magic is
elementary to us now
and over the years
our thoughts have tangled—
it would be hard to extricate
mine from yours
and anyway
I much prefer
the magic

B.R. Donohue, 1980
(on the occasion of my grandparent’s 40th Wedding Anniversary)