Things We’re All Too Young To Know

We’re all too young to know when we will die,
or what will cause it, too young to discover how little
our lives matter, how no amount of planning

or caution will save us. We are too young
to know this is the last vacation we will take
with our grandfather: this one by the shore

where the wind blows only from the east.
We’re too young to have grown children
or arthritis or thin hair, too young to choose

a spouse or profession, to drive a car safely
through the narrow streets of winter.
We’re always too young to have someone

we love tell us they are leaving. We’re too young
for root canals and retirement, too young
for sex, or even the pictures that suggest

its intimate details. We’re too young to play
with matches or to understand why chocolate
is usually eaten after dinner. We’re certainly

too young to know who we will be when
we grow up, to know that the sky’s blues
and grays are indifferent to our luck.

We’re too young for taxes or childbirth,
for dead pets, or the day when we no longer
have parents. We’re too young to find

our own faces foreign: the happiness and sorrow
visible, our skin folded like paper. And we’re
definitely too young for high heels and lipstick,
too young to sit at a bar with a glass of something hard.

My Grandparents’ Generation

They are taking so many things with them:

their sewing machines and fine china,

their ability to fold a newspaper
with one hand and swat a fly.

They are taking their rotary telephones,
and fat televisions, and knitting needles,

their cast iron frying pans, and Tupperware.
They are packing away the picnics

and perambulators, the wagons
and church socials. They are wrapped in

lipstick and big band music, dressed
in recipes. Buried with them: bathtubs

with feet, front porches, dogs without leashes.
These are the people who raised me

and now I am left behind in
a world without paper letters,

a place where the phone
has grown as eager as a weed.

I am going to miss their attics,
their ordinary coffee, their chicken

fried in lard. I would give anything
to be ten again, up late with them

in that cottage by the river, buying
Marvin Gardens and passing go,

collecting two hundred dollars.

“My Grandparents’ Generation” by Faith Shearin from Telling the Bees. © Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015.
[via Reckonings]

[Alive On All Channels]

Servants by Faith Shearin

In college I read about Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton
and I thought of their great minds and their long dresses
and their gilded friendships which involved tea
in the library or on the lawn. I thought of the places
they traveled and the weight of their trunks
and all the ways their marriages did or did not
please them. I thought of the dogs that followed
at their heels and the rooms and gardens they
decorated and the beaches where they
carried umbrellas. But I never once thought of
their servants. I didn’t think of the cook who
woke up to make the fires of morning or the maids
who stood over a pot of hot soap, stirring the day.
I did not think of how someone dressed them
and scrubbed their floors, how someone
brought their dinner on a tray. It was years before
I knew they had them at all: invisible, unremembered,
people who gave their lives to drudgery. Now I
can barely write or finish a book for all the housework
and errands, now I think of them: knocking dust
from the curtains, carrying the rugs outside
each spring so they could beat them with a broom.

"Servants" by Faith Shearin from Telling the Bees