The few memories I have of my grandparents stand out like lampposts. My Grandpa Lindsey singing the names of the vitamins he was taking with his orange juice made from the tacky $1.00 can. His wife, my grandma, recited a ton of poems to me when I was a little kid, as well as play carpet tennis with me, which consisted of two Barbie tennis racquets and a pea-sized ball that we'd bat back and forth on the carpet of her rambler. I would sit with my back up against the record player and its albums with titles like "Charlie is My Darling" and "A Closer Walk to Thee". Yes, they were very Scottish and very Protestant. Anyhow, I was reading a short story by Kerouac that quoted the Edgar A. Poe poem "Annabel Lee" [read "Famine for the Heart" in his book Atop an Underwood].
My grandma would always cry whenever I read this poem to her, usually around the second stanza. She would mouth the words, whisper them under her breath, feeling it along with my reading. It was her deceased father's favorite. Like my mother (and myself, probably) she was and is a walking ball of emotions and memories. She was also a schoolteacher for many years. At random, she would also bust out into the children's poem, "'Come into my parlour,' said the spider to the fly. 'It is the prettiest little parlour that you ever did spy.'" And so on.
I'm rambling/writing today. Apologies. However, this is what I came up with.
"May I come into your parlor?"
asked the spider of the fly.
"I have always wished to do so
ever since I was a child.
Nature forbids it
so I was afraid to ask
but hating one another
has become a tiring task."
"Dear friend," fly said,
"Wonder not of my reply.
For if you dwell upon it
you may never dare to try."
I thought this was a more upbeat take on the poem. Less bloodthirsty.
