Grandmother

 

Out of her own body she pushed

 silver thread, light, air

 and carried it carefully on the dark, flying

 where nothing moved.

 Out of her body she extruded

 shining wire, life, and wove the light

 on the void.

 From beyond time,

 beyond oak trees and bright clear water flow,

 she was given the work of weaving the strands

 of her body, her pain, her vision

 into creation, and the gift of having created,

 to disappear.

 After her, the women and the men weave blankets into tales of life,

 memories of light and ladders,

 infinity-eyes, and rain.

 After her I sit on my laddered rain-bearing rug

 and mend the tear with string.

 --Paula Gunn Allen 

 Paula Gunn Allen was a member of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico. Her mother was Laguna, her father from Lebanon. One of her grandfathers was a German Jew. She was a poet, fictionist, anthologist and scholar, as well as a feminist and Native American activist. She particularly drew upon Native stories from the oral tradition, as in the title of one of her anthologies of fiction by Native women: Spider Woman’s Granddaughters. So the grandmother in this poem may be a version of Spider Woman, a powerful being in several Native traditions including the Laguna, as well as perhaps her own Laguna grandmother. What she weaves may be the blankets and rugs for which the Laguna were known, or the stories that link generations, or even the living world itself.

 Paula Gunn Allen won many awards, including for Lifetime Achievement by the Native Writers' Circle, and the Hubbell Medal for American Literature by the Modern Language Association. Born in 1939, she died in 2008.