| By Julia Nunnaly Duncan |
On Sunday afternoons
in my grandmother’s cool front room
my cousins and I took turns
banging tunes on her Remington upright.
Meaningless melodies we played:
I can read/I can write/I can smoke my daddy’s pipe,
passed down from one generation to another.
In time I learned to read music
and performed for my grandmother
“In the Garden” and “I Love to Tell the Story”
out of a hymnbook she’d brought from Tennessee.
And when the old piano was handed down to me,
I cleaned ivory and polished mahogany
to restore something of what the instrument had been.
Once a player piano—
the rubber tubing long gone,
stripped during a salvage drive
to support World War II—
its Tin Pan Alley tone has remained bright,
and the clacking keys are only a slight distraction.
Today I listen to my daughter play
“The Man I Love” and “Rhapsody in Blue.”
When she’s through I say,
“That’s the way the songs would have sounded
in Gershwin’s day,”
as pleased as my grandmother must have been
when she heard me play hymns
those Sunday afternoons.
Julia Nunnally Duncan lives in Marion, NC, with her husband Steve and their sixteen-year-old daughter Annie, who plays piano in her high school jazz band. Julia has poems appearing in current issues of Southern Women’s Review, Germ Magazine, and The Pikeville Review. She is working on a new collection of poems.
