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My grandmother writes no poetry

but tells stories –

about the sexual proclivities of her hundred-year old father,

he had two wives and a mistress,

the tight-fisted nature of her second sister,

and the greediness of relatives building walls

into her ancestral land like the sun casting shadows

through the depleting of the day –

with a mug of tea in her hand

or with a steel tumbler of whiskey.

No one in my family writes poetry,

their desks aren’t museums for poems that

could come alive,

most of their pages are neatly filed

and have no rings of tea and streaks

of brushed-off ash,

the books in the shelves aren’t bookmarked

using poems that even lover’s rejected,

and they don’t make telephone calls

to announce the arrival of a new poem.

Sometimes, they say poetic things

that I scribble down in the dogears of newspapers

or memorise, and at other times,

I burrow through their paragraphs

and write something to seduce my lovers.

But, reading the note off the fridge today:

“I have finished your cigarettes and whiskey, baba.”

I knew my grandmother had

so much more to say.