The Poem I Found in My Grandmother's Bible
She didn't write it. She kept it.
My grandmother's Bible was the most-used object in the house. Sixty years of Sundays, of readings, of the specific kind of faith that is not about believing but about belonging. The Bible was the thing she used, and the thing she used to keep the things she loved.
I inherited the Bible when she died, along with the watch and the recipe book and the tools I still don't know how to use. The Bible went on the shelf, and for three years it sat there unopened, because I could not look at her handwriting without missing her.
When I finally opened it I found the poem. It was not written by her. It was a poem she had copied from somewhere, a hymn or a verse or a thing she had read and loved enough to keep. It was in her handwriting, the specific way she wrote, the way the letters leaned to the right, the way the pen pressed harder on the downstrokes.
I read it a dozen times. I read it standing in the room where she had read it, and I understood that the poem was not just a poem. It was a thing she had loved enough to copy out by hand, the way you keep a thing you love by making it yours.
I keep the Bible on the shelf now. The poem is still in it, the proof that the things we love are the things we keep, and the keeping is the thing that makes the love real.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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