I Dream of My Grandmother and Great Grandmother

A very nice poem "I Dream of My Grandmother and Great Grandmother" written by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, an italianamerican writer.

I Dream of My Grandmother
and Great Grandmother

I imagine them walking down rocky paths
toward me, strong, Italian women returning
at dusk from fields where they worked all day
on farms built like steps up the sides
5 of steep mountains, graceful women carrying water
in terra cotta jugs on their heads.
What I know of these women, whom I never met,
I know from my mother, a few pictures
of my grandmother, standing at the doorway
10 of the fieldstone house in San Mauro,1
the stories my mother told of them,
but I know them most of all from watching
my mother, her strong arms lifting sheets
out of the cold water in the wringer washer,
15 or from the way she stepped back,
wiping her hands on her homemade flour sack apron,
and admired her jars of canned peaches
that glowed like amber in the dim cellar light.
I see those women in my mother
20 as she worked, grinning and happy,
in her garden that spilled its bounty into her arms.
She gave away baskets of peppers,
lettuce, eggplant, gave away bowls of pasta,
meatballs, zeppoli, loaves of homemade bread.
25 "It was a miracle," she said.
"The more I gave away, the more I had to give."
Now I see her in my daughter,
that same unending energy,
that quick mind,
30 that hand, open and extended to the world.
When I watch my daughter clean the kitchen counter,
watch her turn, laughing,
I remember my mother as she lay dying,
35 how she said of my daughter, "That Jennifer,
she's all the treasure you'll ever need."
I turn now, as my daughter turns,
and see my mother walking toward us
down crooked mountain paths,
40 behind her, all those women
dressed in black.

1 A small village in the province of Salerno, where the poet’s mother came from. The poet’s father migrated to the States in 1922, her mother in 1936.

M. MAZZIOTTI GILLAN, 1993, in Things My Mother Told Me, Guernica, Buffalo, 1999