My Grandma

My grandma had a book in which

To write what she recalled

Of her early life; I found it

And I read what she had scrawled.

 

She came from Pinsk and she described

A time when she was young

When she helped her mom make matzoh;

To this memory she’d clung.

 

Her father drove a trolley car

But left her mother when

She was pregnant with child # three –

That happened even then.

 

To make ends meet, her mother ran

A restaurant from her home,

A two room flat - how hard was that?

(But that’s another poem.)

 

My grandma never got to go

To high school, but she stayed

At a job ‘til she got married –

Just three bucks a week she made!

 

She never once complained aloud

Yet as I read each word,

I’m glad that even though she’s gone,

Her feelings have been heard.