NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 12] - the oldest woman i remember

NaPoWriMo 2026 [April 12]

Day Twelve

Welcome back, everyone, for Day Twelve of National/Global Poetry Writing Month!

Today, our featured participant is Kavya Janani U, who brings us a forbiddingly calm response to Day Eleven’s erasure/blackout prompt. It’s very interesting to contrast here the blacked-out text with the original text.

Our daily resource is this essay by the poet Yuki Tanaka on (mis)translation and how unusual or surprising word choices can make a poem come alive.

Finally, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. Amarjit Chandan has a pretty wild biography, but his poetry is often focused on place and memory – with his hometown of Nakodar appearing repeatedly. His poem “Uncle Mohan Singh” recounts, with a sort of dreaminess, a memory of the titular uncle playing the accompaniment to a silent film. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that recounts a memory of a beloved relative, and something they did that echoes through your thoughts today.

Happy writing!

-

the oldest woman i remember

i remember her almost by furniture.

my grandmother’s grandmother,
my motherline made visible
for one brief afternoon,
sat on a chair
in the village house 
as if she had always been there

while my parents moved through the day
with their younger noise
and my grandmother,
not yet memory herself,
stood nearby,
already practiced
in the old labour of attending.

i was too small
to understand any of it,
to know what it meant
that my grandmother came from her
and i came from my grandmother.

i was too small
to understand lineage,
to understand what it meant
to come from women
who came from women
who came from women.

i was too small
to know what it meant
to belong to so many women at once.

i was too small to know
that a girl first learns womanness
by watching
how women are in a room,
how they sit,
how they wait,
how they are spoken to.

i only knew
that everyone seemed to know
how to place themselves around her.

i do not remember her voice.
i do not remember
the colour of her garment,
the month, the weather,
what anyone said to her.

only this:
she sat there
with such finished stillness
that the whole room
seemed to take its shape from her.

the chair was ordinary.
that is what stays with me.

not carved, not holy,
not ceremonial, not special,
not even remarkable enough
for a child to love at once.
just a chair,
and in it
a woman who had lived long enough
to stop explaining her right
to take up space,
to make quiet look ancestral.

she sat the way
very old trees stand:

very still.
not stiff.
not resting either.
just there.

i think now
that this is part of how womanness arrived to me:

not through mirrors,
not through bangles,
not through the first blood,
not through the first warning,
but through old women,
in the sight of old women
whose bodies had become
archives of use,
what life had asked of them
and what life had done to them,

who sat as if tiredness
proved they had carried something,

who sat with the tiredness
of women who had done everything asked of them
and more,

who took up space
without making anyone comfortable,
without needing to brighten it,
without smiling for it,
without softening age
into something pretty.

she is dead.
my grandmother is dead.
and still the line continues,
not neatly, 
definitely not kindly,
but definitely in gestures.

and now, years later,
she returns to me
whenever i see an old woman
lower herself carefully into a chair,
whenever an older woman
takes the edge of a room
and somehow still changes the whole room,
whenever i find myself sitting quietly
at family gatherings,
watching more than speaking,
as if the mothers before me
left instructions in the spine,
as if i had been taught this
without anyone teaching me.

in the way i enter a house
already measuring its silences.
in the way i watch women’s hands
before i trust their words.
in the way i have learned
that to endure is also
a language passed down.

perhaps that was what she did
that has not stopped echoing:

she sat there
so fully in her place
that a little girl, passing through,
could carry the shape of it away
without knowing,
without understanding,
what it meant
to belong to women:

to their hush,
their labour,
their vanishing,
their unspectacular thrones

and carried that shape away
in her body.

~ Oizys.