#MIDDLEBURY
My Grandmother’s Love Letters
Hart Crane
There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.
There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.
Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.
And I ask myself:
“Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?”
Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.
About this poem
Hart Crane spent much of his formative years living at his grandmother’s home in Cleveland, Ohio, and perusing her extensive library.
About Hart Crane
Hart Crane was born on July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio. His keystone work, “The Bridge,” was a long poem written as a response to T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” that centered on the image of the Brooklyn Bridge. Crane died on April 27, 1932.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
This poem is in the public domain. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
