My grandma is a cottage

On Thursday the 17th of June, I attended a remote book launch for the republication of my grandma’s autobiography Flickerbook. Attendees included my dad Param, award-winning US poet Ruth Fainlight, Leila’s agent Lisa Eveleigh, and Charles Boyle of CB editions, who republished the book.
I think it was a surprise to all that I’d prepared a poem about Leila instead of general sharing around Flickerbook, and my reading felt something like overkill as no one else had formally prepared anything. However, everyone was very good natured and humoured me, and the poem was generally well-received. And as the event was wrapping up and we were starting to say our goodbyes, 90 year old Ruth Fainlight asked to speak and came on to say she’d really liked my poem. So that was all that mattered to me, and here it is:

My grandma is a cottage:
Sugar egg pink
propped up by wonky beams in nooky crannies
she has
a tinkly wind chime doorbell titter
that's pleased to see you

(You have to stoop to go inside
or bang your head)

She has tables for legs
chairs for arms
A clock face
She’s wrapped in shawls of roses filled with bees
Rooted in a reclining chair 
for grandmas
with a hanky up each sleeve

From the record player teems the buzzing of a summer garden 
with jazz horns

A stained glass window pane casts rainbows at her feet
Beside her on a plate, the crumbs of something sweet

She has white chimney smoke curling up for hair
And an army of owls peering out from the eaves
behind her glasses, wide-eyed scrutiny.

The perfume: rose face cream, damp wood, rosehip tea, rainy nettles, lavender and chamomile, calendula and ginger nuts, the breath of moths, the mud of wellies

And, in every room and up the stairs, books.  
The friendly sort, not boring. Spines of green and gold with well thumbed corners,
in rows and piles, on shelves and tables and the floor, some lying down sideways or marked with notes, or lying open-faced as an invitation

This is her wallpaper, this is her heat, this is her skin