Today's NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a poem that retells a family anecdote.
Voyage to America
My grandmother came to America
on a ship from France
with her sisters in the 1920s.
She had a shipboard romance
with a man who was
five years younger.
It was playfully flirtatious
at first, but by the time they reached
New York, they were in love
and he wanted to marry her.
Her sisters talked her out of it,
saying he was too young
for her, he was just a kid.
And so they parted and,
even though they ended up
in the same city,
never saw each other again.
She married my grandfather,
who brought her years of misery
until she finally walked out on him
at age sixty-five.
I never heard this story
until one evening
when I was thirteen and she
was reading obituaries,
as elderly people are wont to do.
She looked up from the newspaper
and said to me,
"My boyfriend died." - Jeff Barnes
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