In a cold winter’s evening with the fire burning bright;

My grandma’s eyes glowed like those embers in a charcoal fire;

We boys and girls would huddle around her in a circle tight;

 Which tapered off towards the epicentre of warmth and desire.

Hers was a wrinkled face hardened with the toil of three score years and more;

Her snow-white hair, it fell across her shoulders, like a skein of silk from head to toe;

She a frail, feeble figure with a pair of teeth missing here and there;

Yet, her voice had that magic to send you in a tizzy, or put you to tears.

Her thin wiry fingers created a panorama from dark and light;

Those chiaroscuro stratagems would be any shadow-puppeteer’s delight;

She gesticulated frantically and created a magical fantasy;

Her myriad figures leapt and danced in a tumult of wild ecstasy.

Those fleeting shadows across the wall did something more than just enthral;

They reinforced a bond of love from a passing generation to an upcoming;

When her deep, sonorous voice recreated a dragon’s voice;

It led us children scurrying for cover in each other’s embrace uniting our hearts and mind.

Those joys and terror that we shared as we lay mesmerized by our grandma’s tales;

Still reverberate in my mind’s eye, a I stand today with an adult’s vision;

They speak to me in muted tones of a Way of Life no more shall be;

Of innocence, simple elegance,  of shared values unencumbered by reason.

Now as I stand alone in that self-same hall;

Its musty, desolate, time-wrecked walls;

Aiming to recreate those long-lost years;

I fail to capture that ambience clear.

The mirror is there before my eyes;

Yet I fail to see the image bright;

The mirror cracks from side to side;

Proclaims of lost innocence and adult’s pride.

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