Grandmothers Speak

My maternal grandmother spoke in parables.
I once thought this custom the exclusive province
of Italian grandmothers.
My Irish grandmother
never puzzled me with paradoxical rhetoric.

She favored ejaculations, equally mysterious turns of speech –
nunly habits of mind, syncopated holy sayings
uttered with up-cast eyes, swift soft blows to the breast,
offered to God through Mary
to shorten stays in purgatory of wayward kin.
When the world is still
I hear the voice of my Irish grandmother
whispering to the realms above my head
“Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.”
“Mother of sorrow, pray for us.”
 
The parables of my Italian grandmother
moved on another rhetorical level,
but likewise on religious ground.
Jesus preached in parables, extolling
mustard seeds and chiding money changers.
But his mission was to redeem sin.
What impulse drove my grandmother
to these biblical tropes?
Severity of mind.
 
I recall or imagine in her a desert
sensibility, an inner Judea,
adamantine, weathered by elements,
like the hills where she was born.
Her sand, utterances of her indirect heart,
filled me with awe, sometimes dread.
I knew she came from another lifetime.
Her parables now seem a primer
to me, hard-scrabble rules
to lead a moral life in an opaque world
where a capricious deity holds sway –
rhetorical ambiguity as means to hedge one’s bets.
 
Her favorite, “He who eats alone chokes.”
I still don’t know what it means.
Yet in some part of my being,
meal times especially,
I continue to believe it’s true.