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Waltzing With My Grandmother
by Aoife Mannix

My Nana in her eighties was full of arthritis
and how the world was going downhill,
yet spent three hours on her broken knees,
using her locked wrists,
to unscrew the plumbing under her sink,
to retrieve the wedding ring
that had slipped down the plug hole
while she was doing the dishes,
my Granddad being nearly twelve years dead.

But this was nothing compared to how
she would lie in bed in her ball gown,
so her father would think she was sleeping,
and as soon as his light was off,
shimmy down drain pipes to run off laughing
to meet my Grandad on the corner to go dancing.
And in one evening she loved to say,
they would cover miles and miles together,
spinning around the hall.

I’m sitting on her leather puff near her feet,
with my coffee going cold,
and putting the ashtray under her cigarette just in time
to catch the long finger of ash falling down,
she smoked her fags to the bone.
She tells me how the day after his funeral,
she was on the bus into town
and it struck her there and then,
that she would never dance again.
But as the evening draws in,
she forgets to put the lights on,
our faces are shadows thrown by the gas fire,
her words burn and swirl like silk on polished wooden floors,
and we both fox trot into the past.

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