• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Bailys Beads

  • Home
  • About
    • Awards
    • Writing at Pitt-Bradford
    • Submissions
    • Contests and Special Features
    • 2023 Editorial Staff
  • Contributors
  • 2023 Edition
    • Editor’s Note
    • Art
    • Fiction
    • Graphic Narrative
    • Nonfiction
    • Poetry
    • Nature and the Environment Feature
  • Past Issues
    • 2022
    • 2021
    • 2020
    • 2019
    • 2018
    • 2016
    • 2015
    • 2013
    • 2012

Smoke and Mirrors

By Clark Zlotchew

Hands all calloused and scarred,
drooping moustache, reading glasses,
aroma of tobacco and aftershave.
cigar butt stuffed into pipe,
hovering clouds of greyish smoke.
Grandpa.

He would bounce me on his knee
while bawling out a rhythmic tune
Hey! Tuli, tuli, tuli. Hey! Tuli, tuli.

When I grew older, he’d regale me 
with stories of his travels, his adventures, 
his life, in the Old Country.

He had traveled 
in heat and in cold,
in rain and in snow,
dusty trails and roads of mud,
hauling sheets of fragile glass,
in a horse-drawn wagon to jounce
over bumps on the road,
dodging pits in his path,
along Ukraine’s plains, so vast,
to carve windows to see outward,
to shape mirrors to see inward.

Grandma spoke of courageous deeds
he was too modest to relate:
Fists and bottles and blood
to protect a young woman
from vodka-soaked beasts
garbed in human clothing,
wolves in sheepish wool.
Yet he was the kindest man I knew.
A hard-working man.
A great man. 
A hero. 
My Grandpa.

Years slid by, so fast, too fast,
steel blades on slickety polished ice.
We talked, we chatted, ideas 
flowed from one to the other,
streams combining into one deep pool,
wars, nations, people, languages,
and even me. 
He cared about 	
my work, my studies,
my adventures, my thoughts. 
My life.

Damnable demon Dementia cast 
its baleful mind-clouding shadow,
its filthy smothering shroud over him,
concealing what made him him. 
I traveled to shave his grizzled face,
leaving his nicotine-stained moustache intact.

He no longer spoke to me 
or even uttered my name.
I wondered did he even know me. 
I wondered but feared to know.
One day I took heart and asked,
“Do you know who I am?”
I held my breath, awaiting his answer.
His indignant response, “Of course, 
you're the boy who shaves me." 

The boy who shaves me!

I turned to gaze out the window 
to conceal my moistened eyes.
The sky turned from bright blue to dark grey.
The air felt heavy, electrically charged.
A storm threatened.

Filed Under: Poetry

Footer

Contact Baily’s Beads

bailys@pitt.edu

Bradford Writes

Pitt-Bradford’s first year writing program’s new publication features our best student writing from our composition classes. Learn more at BradfordWrites.com.

  • Home
  • About
  • Contributors
  • 2023 Edition
  • Past Issues
Copyright 2020 · Baily's Beads | University of Pittsburgh at Bradford | 300 Campus Drive | Bradford, PA 16701