Green Bananas
The way my grandmother put back the green bananas,
unwilling to make an investment in her future,
is how I’m feeling, watching my grown children watching
CNN, sitting side by side on the sofa—no teasing, no tattling—
just image upon image of Armageddon: starvation, explosions,
long lines at the gas pump, and even the Rabbi abandoning town.
Biological, my son says. And my daughter answers no, nuclear.
I’m too embarrassed just now to admit how happy I am
to have them home again, even though they’re only visitors,
no longer “at home.” I built my house too close to the water,
my grandmother used to say whenever I went away. She meant
she was easily moved to tears, and it took my own mother years
to teach me the impossibility of protecting the weak
from the strong. Enough crying, she’d say, clicking her tongue
like she was contesting the intricate but historical patterns
of sudden death. You don’t die so easily. You have to suffer first.
She meant, I now know, to comfort me, to protect me
from her brother’s tank blown upside down in Germany,
the long lines at the gas pumps, the clergy blissfully following
their prayers back home. O but then she’d kiss whatever ailed me,
while my sister railed against injustice, her theme song exploding
above the cushion separating her rights from all I’m still doing wrong.
How can we expect world peace, my father would have said,
—if he wasn’t at that very moment watching I Love Lucy’s slide
across the world’s stage on an overripe banana—
when under one roof my own two children can’t get along.
As for me, just now I’m setting the table and filling the fruit bowl,
whistling like Ricky Ricardo, unaware of his wife’s grand schemes,
the well intentioned but certain and coming disaster. Please stay,
Grandma, I say, holding her tightly in the aisle, unashamed of my tears.
But of course, she died that very day, falling into honeydews,
the melons, like hand grenades, rolling every which way.
Copyright Credit: Richard Michelson, "Green Bananas" from Battles & Lullabies. Copyright © 2006 by Richard Michelson. Reprinted by permission of Richard Michelson.
Source: Battles & Lullabies (University of Illinois Press, 2006)