Women’s Action

The night before she died my grandmother hoped for a new world.
In it everyone would have what they needed,
and give what they could.
I would have liked to leave you that, she said.
This squabbling and gangsterism can’t go on.

We dispute who will get her pearls. I end up
with her father’s silver Seder goblet and her stories.
How she took money from the pushka
to buy her mother a beautiful belt of blue medallions.
How did you pay? her mother asked.
She had to give her daily penny into the box for months.

When she brought her father his noon meal one sweltering day
he was lying on a table to fan himself.
The girls were pulling irons from a fireplace,
dunking them in buckets that exhaled steam, to press the vests.
Don’t you see that workers are people like you? she asked.
She wanted him to cut his beard.
Later she was in love with the minister at St Mark’s in the Bowery.
It was like a sickness, she told me.
She took the streetcar from Avenue D
to hear him preach about socialism.
He too had a beard.
Where do you go on Sunday morning? her father used to ask.