By Gerald Obote

Sometimes the memory of losing someone begins long before the moment we understand that they are gone.

In My Grandfather, Gerald Obote remembers being sent fowling by his grandfather. What begins as an ordinary childhood expedition gradually becomes unsettling. Crows gather along the road, their cawing fills the morning mist, and an unexplained sense of danger follows the children.

When the speaker finally returns home, the meaning of that ominous morning becomes painfully clear. Through childhood memory, birds, silence and grief, the poem remembers a grandfather whose death the young speaker was not yet ready to understand.

The old man sent me fowling.
Why? I didn’t know.
Even now, I still don’t know.

The road was with crows.
Caw-caw, I heard the crow caw.

The old man sent me fowling.

Pheew! I whistled sharply,
signalling the other kids.

We set foot for the ridge.

The road was now dark,
dark with crows.

The morning mist
was filled with cawing.

The old man sent us fowling.

Danger, my friend, danger!

Bad luck was lurking
in our shadows.

We knew it.
We just couldn’t prove it.

It’s uncertain
how we all fumbled.

We would kill two birds
with a single sling.

Today was evil.
The birds shot at us.

Wasn’t this danger, my friend?

We ran home
beneath the cawing,

our guns pointing
at the sky.

I looked. Behold, from afar,
a little dark smoke
hung over the compound.

A cry evocative of a crow
came from home.

A cry of death.

My heart was ripping apart.

Ooh, how I wished
the crow had died

and the cawing gone.

I made for the old man’s hut,

the hut which once
echoed my footsteps.

Today was dead quiet,
quiet like ancient peace.

I walked in,
and the silence ceased.

The loud cry
came to me.

God, have I died!

They stopped me
from getting close

because I was young.

They made me drink
bitter medicine

to prevent him
from telling me,

telling me
about the second life.

Ooh God,
take this cup away.

The old man was smiling,
smiling in my mind.

But he was pale.

Was he still smiling?

But heaven,
heaven only knew my pain.

The old man loved me so much,

so much that he didn’t dare
leave me alone
in all this sorrow.

Ooh God,
take me to the old man.

— Gerald Obote