New Poetry by Anita Howard

Reading With my Grandmother 

Whispering silence among headstones,

your saint enshrined in misty, fractured plastic.

“When I am called,” you told me,

“I want N.T. after my name.”

National Teacher.  Lines with gilt eroded

from buffeting estuary winds.

I see myself, a small child clothed in grey

with fearful eyes, who perches at your side

to read the letters you alone could teach me.

Your voice, your presence, told me all my worth,

and yet I knew that menace would replace them.

For all my life another loomed before me,

grey shadow that I strained to push away,

until I learned that you had never gone.

You’re here, beside me, pointing out the words.

- © Anita Howard 2022

Anita Howard is a writer, storyteller and actor who lives in Passage West, Co. Cork, Ireland.  Her work has been featured as Poem of the Week by the HeadStuff online journal, and has also been published in Poetica Review in April 2022, in the Storytellers of Ireland Newsletter in 2021, in  Good Day News in 2020, in and in Southword in 2001.  It will also feature in the forthcoming Don't Get Caught! anthology for Write In For Charity, Leicester, UK.  Anita is a member of the Cork Yarnspinners storytelling group, and the Hunter’s Moon Theatre Company and Inkwell Theatre Drama Group in Cork.