Emma (Taman) Burwell

Grandma, despite your demands,
punctuated with fist crashing down
on kitchen table, you were aware
that I never could be
an entirely “good boy”
but still I got the pudding.

I remember you bent over in your garden
in arthritic agony pulling pigweeds,
growing enough vegetables for three
families to survive any famine,
swearing loudly but mildly at stray cats
which you fed through the winters.

And how you howled at me and those others
when we battled through the rows
tossing grenades that were edible.
But later you brought an old flowered
plate heaped with biscuits
for all the war-weary urchins.

And, dear grandma, I remember
the look in your eyes as you lay
helpless, full of tubes and
gagging on your saliva. But
you amazed me grandma;
while I wept for that body, you
became a cabbage butterfly and flew away.

Allan Lake is an English teacher, born and raised in the small prairie town of Asquith in Canada’s Saskatchewan province. He has lived and worked in Canada’s Vancouver, Cape Breton Island, and Spain’s island of Ibiza, and has been settled in Melbourne since 2008 after some years also in Tasmania and Perth. As well as seeing his poems published in various journals, his poetry collections include ‘Tasmanian Tiger Breaks Silence and Other Poems’ (1988), ‘Grandparents: Portraits of Strain’ (1994), ‘Sand in the Sole’ (2014), and ‘My Photos of Sicily’ (2020). He edited the Tasmanian high school student poetry annual ‘Traks’ for 11 years, won the UK’s ‘Lost Tower Publications’ prize in 2017, and the ‘Melbourne Spoken Word Poetry Fest/The Dan’ in 2018.

Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. Submissions should be in the body of the email, not as attachments. A poetry book will be awarded to each accepted contributor.