Grandfather Robin

My god,
at 4 a.m.
the robin’s at it
off-key and with such passion.

He’s the first up
and the last to bed
a regular, factory worker type bird
Like my relatives

rising before daybreak
to make sneakers
or fill bottles of beer
or working

the late shift
racking up those pensions.
Health care junkies,
With two cars & a mortgage,

they all quit school at 16,
put their pay in my grandmother’s hand,
till they married and moved out,
one less mouth to feed

in a family of 17. All my uncles had
pride like the robin
orange breast aglow
in an off-to-work light

The girls were quiet. Good girls,
threading the bobbins
folding the boxes
packing auto parts

for shipment to the rest of the world
somewhere out there
beyond the factory,
like a picture on a calendar

hanging on a door,
advertising sneakers, beer,
auto parts, gorgeous
women in gilded dresses.

The early bird gets the worm,
my grandfather would say,
a regular robin type factory worker,
singing the American dream.

So how does that explain me
one generation away
a lesbian, who wears sneakers, drinks beer,
and buys a glitzy dress now and then?

I sleep through the robin’s wake up call
every chance I get.
The America my family built
wishes I’d go away.

My relations won’t say the L word,
vote Republican with pride,
but they’re stuck with me
because of grandpa,

who, like the robin, fed his young
each and every one,
even the occasional cowbird
mistaken in the nest.

We belong.
Even Bobby who O.D’ed on Heroin,
Even Sara who is Portuguese,
even me.

So what if we sing
a little off-key
Grandpa says,
Family is Family.

Lynn Martin
Brattleboro, VT