For My Grandfather

Someone should speak a word for you
who after all lived only long
enough to teach us children’s songs
in Arabic remembered now

with times you strung your lute alone
and plucked it with an eagle’s plume
while we sat quiet, small and calm
and heard you sing of Lebanon

until our days of roundelays
turned brief as breathing, and the vengeance
of cathedrals tolled to silence
all your love and all your minstrelsy.