Asani Charles | Wordsongs for Grandmas

Wordsongs for Grandmas: poems by Asani Charles. Number 2 in our Allison Joseph Series, selected by Allison Joseph.

[ cover: Walter Pach, The Geranium, “The Blue Grotto.” ]

Publication:  October 30, 2023 [100 copies]
33 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-11-2
$ 12.00

Asani Charles, Choctaw/Chickasaw/African American, begins her days with the ringing of a school bell. She is a high school English teacher who enjoys teaching Post Modernism and Multicultural Literature. After a lifetime in their native Southern California, Asani and her family moved cross-country to Dallas, Texas, where she spends her weekends listening to American Indian radio and watching college softball. Her poetry has appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, Love You Madly: Poetry about Jazz, Indian Country Today, and the critically acclaimed Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas. 

The Legend of the Might Could People

The mothers call sons into warm kitchens
and then wrangling leathered hands, they speak,
softly in timid whispers,
“Maybe if you could go and see,
see if they might could
put you on…”
With hope and prayers
mothers bless their sons.

The sons nod out of respect, both for mothers and notions
and then they smile slightly
not mimicking, not grunting, not challenging
but harvesting all their mothers’ dreams
in sulky back pockets, empty like the fronts.
The sons share only morning morsels of 
buttered toast and wishful hugs with the 
women who bore them then and continue still.

And what of these mothers
whose eyes scan laboriously
about the papers and trades,
whose ears avoid catty gossip
but remain glued to calls
for hands, apprentices, and couriers,
and all for the sake of 
carving a man out of a son.

And what of those sons
whose eyes see past scanning
and land on larger blaring shingles;
no vacancies, no applications, discharges soon to come?
What comfort do they have, their only
security unsound in mothers’ prayer cloths.
Their consolation is unspoken among the brethren
but in barbershops and on street corners is certainly understood.

These are the mornings of The Might Could People
whose dreams shy in the presence of reality
whose tongues are faithful to the conditional
whose clutch on the might have been
remains persistent even in the worst situations.
These are the ones whose voices are unheard,
whose marginal villages unseen.

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