To My Grandmother / Ciera Durden

I remember my grandmother bedbound. 

Not bedridden, but bound.

Bound by a sickness that had taken hold of her and had slowly undressed her—

                  first the day-to-day rituals, then the blistering intelligence,

     then finally her whip-crack humor

                                     until she was nothing more than a placid child

     and even that was taken as well

to leave this slack-jawed, dried out excuse of a body. 

Before, people would compare her to a bird—note the frail hands and sparrow eyes

But I tell you my grandmother was an eagle. 

She was the woman who braved the ghosts of two wives before her to hold my

     grandfather’s hand,

She was the woman who stood on twenty foreign shores and who knew the soil of all

     fifty states,

And she was the woman who forced my grandpa to stop the car in the middle of the

     blistered highway
So that she could stand in the dust of a thousand stampeding buffalo. 

This was my grandmother and there is a fury in the word ‘was’ for she did not

     deserve to die like she did,

She did not deserve to die as anyone as herself.

She deserved no special exclusion from death

But she did not deserve to have her fantastic memories stripped away,

To choke on her own spit for twelve days while her body rejected any food or water,

And she did not deserve to slip away quietly like some docile creature and 

     for that,

I hope she gives death hell. 

I hope that her soul hurtled out of her body in a scream of golden feathers

And I hope she travels the lands of death like she traveled the lands of life—

Full, vivacious, and sparking with fire-laughter that would shake the nails out of

     any coffin. 

I hope she roams the afterlife paths the other spirits haven’t the courage to step

     towards,

I hope she waits for no judgment meekly

But meets the eye of every goddess, god, or devil to declare her name

And the story of a life lived grandly.