Premonition

for Grandpa Eddie

Grandpa’s gut was tingly and hot and it had nothing to do with his wife’s cooking

He knew, the way the ancestors knew,
When the slave traders were on the coast, moving in silence,
That his oldest daughter was in danger

Her voice didn’t sound right that last time
She worried about a
Strange Man hanging around the bus station where she worked

Following her with his eyes

She was beautiful

Pie
First of her name, neé Rose Etta
After her grandmother, of the House Westbrook

His ears burned, panic slithered up his spine
Something
Was
Wrong

He could feel it
His bones never lied

He paced the floor in front of the window
Other babies on the couch, face lit by candlelight due to the raging storm
The ten year old watched him with worried eyes and wrinkled brow

He always had the car serviced before a trip
She was oiled and full of gas, ready to gobble the highway between
Holyoke and Albany
As soon as the golfball-sized hail stopped
Pummeling every in its path

The vise around his heart kept tightening
The more he thought of the first of his seven girls
The more he heard her voice, yelling for him down a long corridor
Daddy! Daddy!

His heart nearly stopped beating.

He wrote a letter instead, to free his heart from all he was feeling.
In his sharecropper’s hand, he put his soul on that paper
All his concerns, his fatherly promises

The letter was returned, eventually

After the troopers came to the back door.
After the screams.
After the burial of his murdered girl, beloved Pie

When the letter came back, stamped ‘undeliverable’,
The finality of it settled in the grooves around his face
Replacing the laugh lines
Wrinkled by hot sun and hot grief

He was never the same

His heart was shattered
Not like shards of glass but
Ground into a diamond-dust powder
Razor sharp, shimmery
Dangerous