Nan’s Stories

Speaking sepia-toned sentiments,
she looks away to the past,
and matches the flow of words
with tiny little flicks of her fingers.
Like a favourite cardigan,
she is stretched in places,
but so comfortable and fitting
we hardly notice the wear and tear.

We sit close to her stockinged knees
as she looks at each of us.
She weaves her stories in and out
of our attentive ears, cajoling images
in our over-active imaginations;
these we play like flickering movies
across the screen of our minds-eyes
until she runs out of film.

Mum shoos us outside with promises
of warm biscuits and cordial.
We moan our disappointment
but run out into the bright sunshine
to invent games informed
by the stories we had just heard;
games of pioneers carving life
out of a wondrous untamed frontier.

Nan never tells us of the sadness
of losing a child to a flood-swollen creek
or a husband to a cantankerous band saw
and a particularly knotted piece of pine.
Instead, she fills us with the land’s beauty,
its fragility and its compassion;
forgetting the harsh tragedies of reality
and imparting only love for this land.