This poem will appear in my forthcoming double-CD, which includes an eBook, "Travelin' Poems." Hope you enjoy.

White buttons climb a length of bright dress
in this sepia image of my grandmother.
She's boarded a train in northern India. In the picture
she holds a gloved left hand up at her wren's chest;
ex-patriate face presses against the window
to saffron hills long-since discovered, now left behind at twenty-one—
I, too, smell ginger, turmeric, and cardamon.
A black typhoon curls about her, a storm’s halo

her hat surfs. My grandmother's a daughter of mixed islands:
English cream-skim skin, hair black-glass Tamil sand.
She's buttoned up and bound for Bombay of The Raj,
returning from there to her Salisbury, thousands of miles away, under seige
from Hitler. At rest upon crossed thighs, her right hand softly clenches
as Ruby perches properly atop one of the boxcar's benches.


for Ruby (and Lloyd)