Edith Hamilton lurked behind the door

of the formal dining room like Elijah

waiting for my father’s invitation to the table

 

she always wore the same little black cover

of the 1969 Mentor paperback edition

though in my child’s imagination

 

she became the photograph

of my great grandmother Margery

in her professional pearls and her scholarly tweeds

 

leaning on the low wall in the campus rose garden

smiling wisely into the twenty-first century

and beginning to explain how wings could melt

 

 

 

copyright Megan E. Freeman

originally published in Every Day Poems