Janice Northerns

A grainy eight-millimeter movie
is how I choose to know you,
grandfather who died when I was two. It shows
your only smile as you stand, blurry and mute,

stale cornbread in your hand,
feeding the multitudes of catfish. The fish heft
their silver weight out of a cloudy stock tank
and onto the bank for your gift, prompting that smile,
thin as the celluloid that holds it.

In all other photos you pose grim,
a stark patriarch whose children picked cotton
on Christmas Day — the crops came first.
Visitors praised your small plot:
Fine piece of bottomland you got there, Mr. Davis.

Even this got only a silent nod.
Dry-land cotton showed nothing of a wife
dying in childbirth or the baby girl
she left behind, nothing to suckle her

but your rough knuckle. Sterling City grandparents
took her in and never gave her back,
while you stayed with the five others who got by
on grits and syrup — the ones, including my father —
who walked the fields barefoot, charity shoes

saved for school. Come ginning season, bales
of cotton floated away, caressing
someone else’s wife in a Sunday print,
blanketing babies too tender
for a father’s calloused hand. Grandfather,

whatever words you had for me flicker
fading on the screen of memory, but still I hear you
on those nights when the black humus is grit
under my tongue, clotting my throat. As I claw

for words to fill the gaping ache, I picture you
pulling your children up from the dirt. Each night
you swallowed sorrow dark as sorghum
and rose the next day, ready to drop manna
into another waiting, moist mouth.