Harrier

Helen M. Dobie was a teacher-librarian living in Woodstock, Ontario.

A harrier is a type of hawk, and Terry Griggs has written a prose-poem of a child’s memories of a grandfather she never knew whom she has pictured as just such a wild, untamed creature. Her memories are all stories she has gleaned from her own mother and her grandmother, Jean. Her grandmother would never marry him though he begged her to, and “Old Pop,” Jean’s father “threw him out.” Even the child’s mother has no real memory of her father. “All my mother remembers of her father are his eyes. She saw him only once.” The scene shifts from Scotland to Canada when the narrator’s mother becomes a war bride and goes to live “on an island in the north where she was surrounded by water as cold and blue as his eyes.” These characters are woven in and out of the fabric of a child’s dreams and fantasies. No one is named except Jean, which makes it difficult to keep them separate. They do, however, become quite real to us except for the grandfather, who remains ethereal even in the child’s mind, and whose picture she is constantly trying to flesh out.

Language is used like paint on a canvas to picture the scenes that are so real to the child. The sentences are like brush-strokes, some short and crisp, others a streak of colour, and still others a complex blending of tones. They serve to enhance the dream-like quality of the person who has become so important in the child’s life.

What the river flowing from my grandmother brings. Him. He stepped into her dreams and swam down to me. Now he’s the current, the sinew, the stinging whip in my own dreams. I can almost see him. A shadow in the doorway.

This writing sounds autobiographical, something that has perhaps haunted the author for many years. It has been beautifully portrayed for its readers.